I want to propose a four-part test for measuring any particular bill on health care cost control. short run long run Federal deficit 1 2 Government health care spending X 3 Private health care spending X 4 In each case, I will define the test so that “yes” is a good outcome: Test 1: The […]
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Tag Archives: taxes
Understanding the House Democrats' health care bill
9 June 2009 
218 Comments
Yesterday I posted and described the draft Kennedy-Dodd health care bill. Today I would like to do the same for an outline produced by House Democrats. Here is a three-page outline of “Key Features of the Tri-Committee Health Reform Draft Proposal in the House of Representatives,” dated yesterday (June 8, 2009). The three committees are: […]
Read more Understanding the Kennedy health care bill
8 June 2009 383 Comments
Over the weekend a draft of Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) health care bill leaked. After playing with Adobe Acrobat, here is the text of the draft Kennedy bill as a text file (173 K), and as a single Acrobat file (3.4 MB). Update: I fixed the broken link to the PDF. Unlike the leaked version, both of […]
Read moreWill the stimulus come too late?
3 June 2009 38 Comments
I began this blog at the end of March after the stimulus bill had become law. I had been struck by how much the stimulus debate had focused on whether the bill was efficient. (It clearly was not.) There was much less discussion of whether the stimulus would be effective, and of the timing of […]
Read more Parsing the President’s health care reform letter
3 June 2009 11 Comments
The White House has released a letter from the President to the two Senate Chairmen who are working on (different) versions of health care reform: Senator Kennedy (D-MA), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter is dated yesterday and […]
Read moreThe Smoot-Krugman carbon import tariff
29 May 2009 34 Comments
I wrote last Friday about the China/India hole in the American climate strategy: America appears to lack a high-probability strategy for how to get China, India, and Russia to agree to self-impose a significant positive carbon price. The Administration and its Congressional allies are trying to impose a significant carbon price in the U.S. through […]
Read moreBaseline games
21 April 2009 6 Comments
Suppose I bought an iPhone yesterday for $500. Suppose I argue that I will save $2000 this week, because I intend to refraining from buying an additional iPhone today, nor will I buy one this Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Suppose I plan to buy a new flat screen TV tomorrow for $1500. Can I claim […]
Read more America’s long-run fiscal problem is spending growth, not taxes
16 April 2009 18 Comments
Yesterday I wrote about the history of tax increases since World War II, and about the battle over the total level of taxation. Now I want to turn to spending. I am a low-tax guy. I have worked on tax issues for 12 of my 15 years in Washington, helping elected officials lower taxes and […]
Read more The total tax battle
15 April 2009 6 Comments
Now that we have reviewed how big a bite the government has taken out of the economy over time, let’s examine the competing tax proposals for the near future. Revenues are only one element of a budget proposal. For a complete picture of the effect of a budget proposal on the rest of the economy, […]
Read more A short history of higher taxes
15 April 2009 16 Comments
There is always a lot of rhetoric on Tax Day. Later I will comment on some of today’s rhetoric. In this post I will instead focus on some basic facts that are not earth-shattering, but provide some important historic context for the current tax and spending debate. Let’s start by looking at just the total […]
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