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Archive of posts published in the tag: Phil Gramm

The Gilded Myth

While the period of industrial expansion did create both economic and political dislocations, the benefits were often overlooked in our history.  The restraint on concentrations of political power in our constitution applied largely to economic power in an agrarian economy but this diverged in the industrial era.  The great dilemma of the progressives was how to address the concentrations of economic power without losing the restraints on the concentration of political power.

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Vichy Capitalism

The regulatory burden rarely get the coverage of tax policy because it is complicated, hard to measure and reporters are lazy- yet the combination is the total friction cost on business.  Increasing the regulatory burden while stimulating the money supply may be the simplest and best definition of stagflation.

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Is Inequality a Problem?

Relative poverty is a very different problem from absolute poverty.  If you were sitting in a room with a 100 executives making a six figure income and Bill Gates walked in, the inequality would skyrocket.  Is that a problem?

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The Success and Failure of Our Poverty Programs

“The stated goal of the War on Poverty is not just to raise living standards, but also to make America’s poor more self-sufficient and to bring them into the mainstream of the economy. In that effort the war has been an abject failure, increasing dependency and largely severing the bottom fifth of earners from the rewards and responsibilities of work.”

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The New Challenge of a Growing Economy

Most do not realize that we have not yet paid the bill for the recession and the Obama spending. Obama depended on the Keynesian multiplier to stimulate the economy. It failed because too many other friction costs counteracted it; including higher taxes, increased regulations, and a generally unfriendly business climate in DC. Even without these friction costs, the benefit of the multiplier is limited. 

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Obama’s Sand Castle

from Phil Gramm and Michael Salon at The WSJ , Cheer Up, Obama’s Legacy Can Be Erased: President Obama seems to aspire to join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as one of the three most transformative presidents of the past hundred years, and by all outward signs

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Transforming American Rule

from Phil Gram in The Wall Street Journal,How Obama Transformed America Excerpts: American democracy has historically relied on three basic constraints: a shared commitment to the primacy of the constitutional process over any political agenda, the general necessity to achieve

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A Legacy of Sand

from Phil Gram in The Wall Street Journal,How Obama Transformed America Excerpts: Americans have always found progressivism appealing in the abstract, but they have revolted when they saw the details. President Clinton’s very progressive agenda—to nationalize health care and use

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Glue In the Financial Machinery

from Phil Gramm in The Wall Street Journal, Dodd-Frank’s Nasty Double Whammy: Over the years the Federal Trade Commission and the courts defined what constituted “unfair and deceptive” financial practices. Dodd-Frank added the word “abusive” without defining it. The result:

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The Gini Distortion

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: An equally extraordinary distortion in the

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Inequality and The Tax Reform of 1986

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: Messrs. Piketty and Saez also did

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Inequality and The Missing Data

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: The chosen starting point for

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There is No Victory in a Class War

From Phil Gramm and Steve McMillan in their article in the Wall Street Journal, The Real Causes of Income Inequality, 4/6/12. Inequality is a natural result of the expansion of liberty and the development of new technology and new products. Henry

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The Tax Act of 1986 and Income Distribution

I have posted several times about the perception and the reality of growing income inequality.  To summarize several of the those entries:  the data can be very misleading depending on which time periods are considered, what is included in income

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