THINK TANK ROUND-UP. It's not a day late; instead, I've just moved it to Fridays. Which I can do, because I am the benevolent hegemon of the think tank round-up.
- Skills Aren't Enough: The Economic Policy Institute's Larry Mishel and Richard Rothstein take aim at the comforting platitudes promising education as a panacea for global competition. Noting that an Indian engineer makes, on average, $7,500, while an American makes $45,000, Mishel and Rothstein ask, "Should American schools really be expected to graduate engineers who are five times, or even twice, as productive as those living elsewhere? School reform cannot be the primary answer to such problems. We distract ourselves from grappling with serious economic challenges by a myopic focus on school improvement alone."
- A Simple, Progressive Replacement for the AMT: You hear a lot about the need to reform the alternative minimum tax, which has begun nailing all manner of middle-income households. But you rarely hear much as to how. The Urban Institute's Leonard E. Burman and Greg Leiserson propose "repealing the AMT and replacing it with an add-on tax of four percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) above $100,000 for singles and $200,000 for couples." The option is budget neutral, highly progressive, and would lead to most families under the $500,000 mark bearing a lighter tax load.
- Trade and Globalization: Ever wonder why you seem to hear so much more about globalization these days? Brookings' Lael Brainard explains: "The current episode of global integration dwarfs previous expansions. An economy with a labor force of 1.7 billion has been abruptly confronted with absorbing a labor force of 1.2 billion -- with wages as much as 90 percent lower. The entry of India and China amounts to a 70 percent expansion of the global labor force. That is more than three times bigger than the globalization challenge of the 1970s and 80s associated with the sequential entry of Japan, South Korea, and the other Asian tigers."
- Why Does Immigration Divide America? Identify a group", says the Institute for International Economics' Gordon Hanson, "whose members tend to agree on political issues—liberals, conservatives, isolationists, internationalists, environmentalists, free marketers -- and one will tend to find that within the group there is no strong majority opinion about US immigration policy." Hanson argues, in a freely downloadable book, that it's public finance splitting these general allies.
- Are We Happy Yet? Over at Cato Unbound, Darrin McMahon asks whether our culture's ceaseless pursuit of happiness actually gets us any closer to the goal.
--Ezra Klein
