The proposals
One: Eliminate the mortgage tax deduction, which lets homeowners deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages. Gone. After all, big houses get bigger tax breaks, driving up prices for everyone. Why distort the housing market and subsidize people buying expensive houses?
Two: End the tax deduction companies get for providing health-care to employees. Neither employees nor employers pay taxes on workplace health insurance benefits. That encourages fancier insurance coverage, driving up usage and, therefore, health costs overall. Eliminating the deduction will drive up costs for people with workplace healthcare, but makes the health-care market fairer.
Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people.
Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.
Five: Tax carbon emissions. Yes, that means higher gasoline prices. It's a kind of consumption tax, and can be structured to make sure it doesn't disproportionately harm lower-income Americans. More, it's taxing something that's bad, which gives people an incentive to stop polluting.
Six: Legalize marijuana. Stop spending so much trying to put pot users and dealers in jail — it costs a lot of money to catch them, prosecute them, and then put them up in jail. Criminalizing drugs also drives drug prices up, making gang leaders rich.
The economists
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and widely published blo "You could probably describe me as left of center. It'd be fair."
Russ Roberts, George Mason University economics professor. "In the grand spectrum of economic policy, I'm a pretty hard core free market guy. I'm probably called a libertarian."
Katherine Baicker, professor of health economics at Harvard University's Department of Health Policy and Management. We simply called her a centrist on the show.
Luigi Zingales, professor of entrepreneurship and finance and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "What I like to say is that I'm pro-market, but not necessarily pro-business."
Robert Frank, professor of management and economics at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management. "I'm a registered Democrat. I think of myself as a radical pragmatist."
Posted by WildestDreams_
7 Comments
Five policies that’ll destroy your party in a landslide and one that’s only partly economic
I agree mostly, though on num 4, we tax income for two important reasons.
**One**: It’s easy to track, this is probably the most important reason. It’s just dead simple to implement and enforce. This is an incredibly important distinction and I would argue, the main reason why it’s a good source of income. We can always fuss with it as needed to prevent the effects we don’t like, such as EITC to help motivate people to work.
**Two**: It’s also dead simple to make progressive, it’s a naturally a progressive tax and helps redistribute wealth, perhaps second only to the estate tax in ease of redistribution. Runaway inequality is…not great for stability and sure we could theoretically do a VAT tax and then offer massive social safety nets and such like a European model, but unless we get universal healthcare and the such actually in place, all we are going to end up is with even more inequality.
For 6, this is not really an economics issue this is a criminal justice issue and not sure why they mentioned it TBH. I would hope they understand that a lot of this stuff is because large swaths of society simply like the idea of putting people in jail and punished them for various, typically racially charged reasons. I don’t think anyone even uses economics as a justification of why it’s banned.
This came out in 2012.
A lot of the points are still valid, but the fundamental economic picture has changed.
The US government is way more cash strapped than it was 13 years ago
>**Two:** End the tax deduction companies get for providing health-care to employees. Neither employees nor employers pay taxes on workplace health insurance benefits. That encourages fancier insurance coverage, driving up usage and, therefore, health costs overall. Eliminating the deduction will drive up costs for people with workplace healthcare, but makes the health-care market fairer.
“Let’s make the healthcare market fairer by making it substantially worse for the majority of people while also effectively slashing their compensation by thousands of dollars” is not good policy. We should end these deductions and insurance *shouldn’t* be tied to employment, but it needs to be part of a more comprehensive reform effort that makes the insurance market less of a hellscape in general rather than just making it equally bad for everyone in the name of slightly depressing the rate of cost growth.
>Legalize marijuana. Stop spending so much trying to put pot users and dealers in jail — it costs a lot of money to catch them, prosecute them, and then put them up in jail. Criminalizing drugs also drives drug prices up, making gang leaders rich.
This is more political than economics, regardless:
Agree with not jailing the pot users, not the pot dealers and distributors. Criminalizing the production, distribution, and sale of marijuana makes it harder, riskier, and costlier to do business and therefore make a profit. Possible exclusion for medical marijuana.
You know they wanted to say land value tax.
**Just** doing 1 and 2 would raise $3 trillion over a decade, btw