Monthly Archives: August 2010

Fairness, Taxes, and the Bush Oddity

I’ve taken a moment and cooked up some charts exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ship between tax rates and income equal­ity. Here’s the most rel­e­vant one. It shows the effec­tive tax rates on the top and bot­tom income quin­tiles and their effect on income equal­ity (1979−2006). As the rela­tion­ships clearly demon­strate, increas­ing the tax rate on the top …

9 August 2010 – 4:53 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Taxes | Comments (172)

Stimulus: A Shot in the Arm

Steve Benen posted his monthly update of job progress, but I wanted to get a closer look at the num­bers. So I threw together this chart using pri­vate sec­tor job num­bers only (basi­cally, ex-​​​​Census), and includ­ing a stim­u­lus spend­ing line based on February’s stim­u­lus report (no data for this month yet, but it’s my under­stand­ing …

6 August 2010 – 5:06 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Economics | Comments (221)

GDP, Hedonics, and Imputation

A recent repost over at Naked Cap­i­tal­ism brought to my atten­tion the ques­tion of how US GDP is cal­cu­lated. In par­tic­u­lar, this snip­pet caught my eye: No other coun­try makes these so-​​​​called adjust­ments, using a hedo­nic price index. And the cumu­la­tive dis­tor­tion is mas­sive. In 2005, economist/​​investment advi­sor Michael Shed­lock con­tacted the Bureau of Eco­nomic Advis­ers and they …

4 August 2010 – 7:00 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Economics | Comments (196)