Brad DeLong asks a crucial Fair Tax question:
[I]t’s a mammoth tax cut for the crowd making more than $200,000 a year and a substantial tax increase for those making between $30,000 and $200,000 a year. Does this make economic sense? It is hard to see how: What makes the $200,000-plus crowd especially deserving of a tax cut?
Arnold …
In answer to some questions about what Danish income tax rates actually are, Jacob Braestrup of the Confederation of Danish Industries offers this explanation:
The Danish top income tax bracket of 15 percent is what takes the top marginal tax to a total of 63 percent (from 49 percent – I know the difference is only 14 percentage points,
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Mike Huckabee’s victory in Iowa Thursday was a big victory also for the “Fair Tax,” the radical revamping of the federal tax code that he endorses. And while Huckabee’s Iowa win may be a one-off, one gets the feeling that the Fair Tax campaign will be with us for a while. The resurgent John McCain is mildly supportive of it as well. And …
I have a new column in the issue of Time with Benazir Bhutto on the cover and online here. It begins:
They’re turning 62 this month, the first of the baby boomers are. Adorable, aren’t they, as they hum along to the Beach Boys on their iPods and dream of Davy Crockett coonskin caps? In February the 100,000 or so of these January 1946
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Our morning meetings are dominated by politics. Today’s led off with a rousing post-mortem of the surprising results in Iowa last night. We talked about Time.com‘s speedy and smart coverage, Joe Klein’s take on Obama’s victory, and Joel Stein’s video analysis of one voting center at an Iowa elementary school (it has to do with cookies …
Marc Fisher’s article in the Sunday Washington Post about the latest development in the Recording Industry Association of America’s campaign to sue every last person in America has taken on an interesting life of its own. Wrote Fisher:
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court
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Here, from an e-mail I just got from the folks at Russell Investments, are the world’s 10 top-performing stocks of 2007:
Inner Mongolia Yitai Coal Co. Ltd., China, 1017%
Jai Corp. Ltd., India, 877%
Reliance Natural Resources Ltd., India, 823%
Ispat Industries Ltd., India, 742%
Jindal Steel & Power Ltd., India, 664%
Essar Oil Ltd., …
In response to my post on whether high taxes really explain Denmark’s brain drain, Jacob Braestrup, adviser on tax policy to the Confederation of Danish Industries, had this to say:
I’m sorry, but I fail to see your point.
As you yourself point out, “Taxes are the only one of those top four factors that Danish politicians can do much
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I confess: my TV tastes run to trash. I’ll watch any tacky reality show they throw up on network or basic cable. If I didn’t live with a man who insists on a modicum of pop-cultural dignity, our Time Warner™ DVR would be jammed only with saved episodes of American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars. I’ve …
I can’t quit my job. One big reason is that I can’t afford health insurance on my own. (Another is that I need an income, and I can’t lift heavy objects.) So I was intrigued when I learned a few years ago of the Freelancers Union, a New York-based group that offers health insurance among other things to solo practitioners. The idea is …
The NYT ran an article last week on young workers leaving Denmark to escape high taxes. The main example given was that of Thomas Sorensen, a software engineer who now lives in Frankfurt. The photo caption claimed that he works in Germany “to avoid the 63 percent top tax rate in his homeland.” When you actually read the article, though, …
We were sitting around the carcass of a 17-pound prime rib roast on Christmas Day when my two brothers decided to place a bet: which of them could lose more weight in a year’s time? Just to set the picture, either of them would be welcome additions to any sumo dojo, and at stake is an all-expenses-paid trip to South Asia by my folks (not …
