The 70% tax solution
Thursday 1 December 2011 – by J. Bradford DeLong / Project Syndicate
Via a circuitous Internet chain – Paul Krugman of Princeton University quoting Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon reading the Journal of Economic Perspectives – I got a copy of an article written by Emmanuel Saez, whose office is 50 feet from mine, on the same corridor, and the Nobel laureate economist Peter Diamond. The unavoidable implication of this argument is that when we calculate what the tax rate for the superrich will be, we should not consider the effect of changing their tax rate on their happiness, for we know that it is zero. Rather, the key question must be the effect of changing their tax rate on the well-being of the rest of us. To read this article in full, please visit our partner site, Project Syndicate, by clicking here. J. Bradford DeLong, a former assistant secretary of the US Treasury, is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011. www.project-syndicate.org
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