Worthwhile Reads
Progressive Taxes May Discourage the Most Productive Work - The Daily Economy
How many other families find themselves in a situation similar to ours? I found exactly one study on the question. It found that a 10 percent increase in the net-of-tax rate causes a worker to choose an occupation with a 0.3 percent higher wage, on average. (The “net-of-tax rate” is the rate at which wages are converted into post-tax earnings, so you can think of it as the inverse of a tax rate.) It’s a small effect, but added up across an entire economy could amount to billions of dollars in new wages from a typical tax cut. Moreover, it confirms the theory: people are willing to work harder, better-paid jobs when taxes are lower.
Rare Earths, Real Bottlenecks, and Misguided Policy - American Spectator
This is where policies have been most destructive. The current U.S. framework governing naturally occurring radioactive material was built around a legal culture that tends to treat low-level industrial radioactivity as if it were akin to nuclear weapons risk. The result is a permitting and liability environment so cumbersome that firms without legacy nuclear authorizations often cannot economically justify touching feedstocks that are routinely processed elsewhere under sensible industrial standards. In effect, the U.S. government has created a system in which strategically useful material becomes commercially toxic the moment it enters a domestic balance sheet.
The Juggling Act - Law & Liberty
On paper, the Fed and Treasury were separate. In practice, however, Congress and the White House continually pressured the Fed to purchase debt to accommodate expansive spending for the Vietnam War and Containment Policy abroad and the Great Society at home. Under the Bretton Woods international gold exchange system established after World War II, foreign governments were required to redeem their gold in US dollars. The federal government took advantage of this by printing more dollars than could be redeemed in gold. As countries became aware of this fact, President Nixon suspended the ability for those governments to exchange dollars for gold in August 1971, promising the measure would be temporary. That temporary suspension remains in place today.
AIER Names Samuel Gregg as President - The Daily Economy
The Board of Trustees of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), one of the oldest and most respected nonpartisan economic research and educational organizations in the United States dedicated to promoting classical liberal and free-market ideas, has appointed Dr. Samuel Gregg as its new President.
Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts - Brookings
No notes here, but Jessica Reidl is easily one of the best if not the best person doing work on the federal budget right now. When I was with the Senate Budget Committee during the summer of 2015, I referred to her past and then-current work extensively and learned so, so much. This link contains so many charts on so many things and is presented in a remarkably non-biased way that is emblematic of Jessica’s work throughout her entire career.
On that note…
Ten Myths About the U.S. Tax System (Update) - Freakonomics
Here’s Jessica again, speaking with Stephen Dubner about the US tax system, how complicated it is, how it fails to achieve its basic function(s), and why reforming it is so much harder than anyone recognizes.
And in honor of it being Tax Week in America, here’s one of my favorite academic papers on public finance by none other than Richard Wagner. It’s a short one, published in 1976 and contains one of the only times I’ve seen Dick use an actual regression in his work, but it’s not doing the heavy lifting of the piece:
Revenue Structure, Fiscal Illusion, and Budgetary Choice - Public Choice
Economists are increasingly coming to understand and to recognize how the performance of a market economy depends upon, among other things, the stock of knowledge possessed by participants concerning such items as product prices and wage rates. Analogously, it would seem reasonable that the performance of the public economy would depend upon the stock of knowledge possessed by voters about such items as tax-prices of public output. This paper examines one facet of the impact of fiscal institutions upon taxpayer knowledge, viz., the impact of alternative degrees of complexity in the revenue structure upon the stock of taxpayer knowledge concerning tax-prices of public output. The central question addressed in this paper is whether a choice between financing public output from a single tax or from a variety of smaller taxes will affect the stock of taxpayer knowledge about tax-prices, and, through this, affect public budgetary choices.