Tim Fernholz

I’m surprised to see Howard Gleckman has a different interpretation of the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the fiscal commission’s working paper than I did: “Paul Krugman & friends can rest easy. The Bowles-Simpson proposal is indeed an across-the-board tax increase– and a fairly progressive one at that.” Huh? The numbers I’d seen looked very […]

…what’s that mean? Matt Labash, a writer at The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine whose editor, William Kristol, kick-started Sarah Palin’s national career, pilloried the Alaskan demagogue’s new TLC show. A sampling: Palin intones in the show’s opening, “A-LASK-ahhhh—I love this state like I love my family.” Except that she didn’t give her family up […]

Looking down the legislative schedule, nearly everyone recognizes that a vote expected this spring to raise the country’s debt ceiling will be an opportunity for posturing from critics of government debt and a test of the GOP’s ability to govern responsibly. Raising the debt limit will allow the government to borrow enough money to fund […]

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics is known as a public-spirited organization that hunts for corruption in Washington. Today, its executive director, Melanie Sloan, announced that she was departing the organization to join the lobbying firm of Lanny Davis, the former Clinton White House counsel now best known for putting a liberal veneer on corporate policy […]

Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech in Frankfurt asking the U.S. government to do more fiscal stimulus: “A fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits would be an important complement to the policies of the Federal Reserve,” Bernanke said, adding that […]

Whereas it seemed Democratic House Leadership was prepared to do the right thing and force a single vote on extending the middle-class tax cuts, the Senate’s effort to do the same may fail because of a lack of votes. According to The Washington Post, here are their excuses: Democrats acknowledged that such a bill is […]

It’s the GOP strategy: Cut taxes, get into a lather about high tax rates, repeat. (I’ve left out the part about blowing up the deficit.) Here, influential House Republican Mike Pence puts the strategy into action: Jim DeMint and I are offering legislation on Capitol Hill today to say, look, let’s make all the current […]

Ezra Klein shares a graph he says explains the regulatory burden: This graph strikes me as mis-titled. For one, a decade-long shift of about a tenth of a percent relative to private-sector employment doesn’t strike me as a massive increase in anything. Secondly, as Ezra notes, a lot of the recent change likely has to […]

The Washington Post reports that Republicans, having gotten a taste of that sweet, irresponsible obstruction, don’t see why they shouldn’t give it a try for another two years: They say they will insist on keeping in place all the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the incoming […]

In my various critiques of the working paper released by the president’s Fiscal Commission, I’ve been careful to note that we really need a better analysis of the distributional effects of the tax-reform plan before pulling out our jump-to-conclusions mats. Well, the widely respected Tax Policy Center has done the numbers, and — surprise, surprise […]