In National Review, Kevin Hassett, the former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, asks Ed Conard to defend conservative free market capitalism and how it promotes entrepreneurial risk-taking that has grown middle-class incomes faster than Europe. Five Questions for Ed Conard National Review Online August 21, 2020 1) Many liberals claim capitalism no longer works for the middle and working class. Is it true? No. According to the Congressional Budget ... Read More
Lies, Damned Lies, and Steve Rattner’s Statistics
Lies, Damned Lies, And Steve Rattner’s Statistics If liberal economists could win the economic debate with honest arguments, they would make them. As President Reagan once joked, “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.” In his New York Times op-ed, Steve Rattner adds his name to the list of people willing to compromise their reputation to mislead the American people. No serious ... Read More
Doesn’t Taxing the Middle Class Less Than the Full Cost of the Government Services They Consume Weaken Democracy?
The true measure of taxation is the amount one pays over and above the cost of the government services they consume—the dollars redistributed from one person’s pocket to another’s. We don’t consider it taxation when we buy food. We should think about taxation for government services in the same way. Taxes are what we pay over and above the cost of the government services we receive. Interestingly, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has conducted the complex ... Read More
Even Liberal Economists Agree Investors Must Create $5 for Others to Put a $1 in Their Pocket
In truth, investors profit relatively little from their creations. A study by the Yale economist William Nordhaus concludes, “Only a miniscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948–2001 period was captured by producers indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” Nordhaus estimates that innovative producers capture less than 5 percent of the value their ... Read More
