A new book tries to get progressives comfortable with the free-trade consensus. There’s a better solution.
Max Sawicky
Max B. Sawicky is an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. He has worked in the Office of State and Local Finance of the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
Mr. Sawicky has studied and written about the economics of public finance, including the federal budget, tax policy, the U.S. federal system, state and local finance, privatization, and welfare reform. His reports for the Economic Policy Institute include: "The Roots of the Public Sector Fiscal Crisis"; "The Poverty of the New Paradigm"; and "Up From Deficit Reduction." He is a co-author (with Craig Richards and Rima Shore) of Risky Business: Private Management of Public Schools, and editor of The End of Welfare? Consequences of Federal Devolution for the Nation.
Mr. Sawicky has been a contributor to USA Today, Newsday, the Newark Star-Ledger, the Austin-American Statesman, the San Diego News-Tribune, the Cincinatti Enquirer, the Houston Chronicle, the Dayton Daily News, In These Times, Challenge, the Progressive Populist, Dollars and Sense, Dissent, Aging Today, Social Policy, Jobs and Capital, Education Digest, the School Administrator, Social Forces, Intellectual Capital, the Review of Radical Political Economics, New Economy, and the New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations. He is an at-large national board member of Americans for Democratic Action.
Mr. Sawicky received a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Posted inEconomic Policy
The General Store of the U.S.A.
Do Walmart and Amazon’s logistics triumphs reveal a path forward for a centrally planned economy?
Posted inArticle
Errors Of Commission
The President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform is about to disgorge its recommendations. Early reports suggest that it will push for three general changes: Simplify the individual income tax by reducing or eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and some deductions; Increase the exclusion of investment income from tax; Consolidate tax benefits for working families […]
Posted inSpecial Report
The Easy Money
The Internal Revenue Service estimates that some $350 billion in taxes owed to the federal government is evaded or otherwise unpaid every year. That sum, also known as the “tax gap,” nearly equals the current federal budget deficit. Of this $350 billion, enforcement efforts eventually recover about $43 billion — and much more could be […]
Posted inFeatures
Why Pay Down the Public Debt?
Y our taxonomist and my friend, Robert McIntyre, has offered us a lesson on the merits of paying down public debt [“In Praise of Debt Reduction,” September 11, 2000]. Everyone knows Bob’s work on tax policy is invaluable, but his class on fiscal policy is one I’d rather cut. Bob begins with the reasonable point […]
Posted inFeatures
How Do You Spell Relief?
Big tax cuts are in the offing. The high priests of fiscaldiscipline find their flocks deserting, egged on by President George W.Bush, the GOP, and the Janus-faced Federal Reserve Board chairman. Butwho will get the benefit? Critics of Bush’s tax-cut plan in both parties appear to be atsomething of a loss to propose alternatives that […]
Posted inFeatures
It Takes a Tax Credit to Raise a Child
W ith some creative expansion, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) could all but end poverty among working-class families with children and help a lot of middle-class parents as well. The EITC is now this country’s second-largest means-tested program that aids the poor. (Medicaid is the largest.) It goes primarily to families that have children […]