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  • Plus ça change… | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
  • Jeffrey Sachs: The Super Committee’s Big Lie

    …Americans are told daily that these low tax rates on the rich are the natural order of things, that the American economy would collapse if the top 1 percent were to pay more to help fund education, job training, infrastructure, and new technologies. This claim is absurd. We should be collecting at least 3 to 4 percentage points of GNP more from the rich and the corporate sector. We could collect these added amounts by raising top tax rates on regular income and capital gains, closing down offshore tax havens, taxing net worth of high-wealth households, taxing financial transactions, and cracking down on evasion.The big lie against raising taxes on the rich comes in two variants. The most preposterous is that the U.S. simply could not collect more revenues as a share of GDP. According to some foolish assertions, an iron law of revenues puts the maximum federal tax collection at around 18 percent of GDP! Yet European high-income countries, and Canada, collect somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of GDP more in taxes than the U.S. There is no iron law against raising more revenues.

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  • House conservatives contradict themselves on tax increases – The Washington Post

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