Friday, March 02, 2012

Making the United States More Like Greece

Simon Johnson has a good post, Making the United States More Like Greece. Apparently the Republicans so believe their mantra that cutting taxes raises revenue, they want to change the way the CBO scores budget proposals. This is known as "dynamic scoring". The problem is, it's wrong.

"In the modern United States, cutting taxes leads to lower revenue and larger budget deficits. There are no two ways about this – as Ronald Reagan discovered in the early 1980s. (In our new book, White House Burning, we go through the evidence on this point in detail, including important work by Greg Mankiw, former top economic adviser to George W. Bush and now working with Mitt Romney, which confirms that cutting taxes in the U.S. will lower revenue.)"

"Alan Greenspan – a leading Republican in his day – got this right in congressional testimony back in 1995 (quoted by Mr. Buckley), 'Should financial markets lose confidence in the integrity of our budget scoring procedures, the rise in inflation premiums and interest rates could more than offset any statistical difference between so-called static and more dynamic scoring.'"

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