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Should Ben Bernanke Host Survivor?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 9, 2007 CommentLast night's première of the 14th season of the reality television show Survivor had a ripped-from-the-headlines feel about it.
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Romney, Climate Change, and Growth
Tweet Share on Facebook February 8, 2007 CommentThe debate about the existence of global warming is over. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who will probably announce next week that he's officially a candidate for president in 2008, single-handedly erased any lingering doubts I may have had during his interview yesterday with Lawrence Kudlow on CNBC's Kudlow & Company. (Host Kudlow also writes an insightful blog on economics and policy.) Romney gave some vague answers regarding his views on dealing with climate change, other than to emphasize that he wanted market-oriented solutions. But Romney, a guy who is trying to portray himself as a follower of Reaganomics, never really contested the underlying science. And probably no major 2008 candidate will either, for fear of being labeled a scientifically illiterate know-nothing.
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Do We Need a Special Tax for the War on Terrorism?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 7, 2007 CommentI have this cousin who is a real national security hawk. When he pays his federal income taxes every year, he writes on the check–on the "for" line in the bottom left-hand corner–exactly what he wants his tax dollars spent on. One year he wrote, "B-2 bomber." Another year it was "Strategic Defense Initiative." I couldn't help thinking of him when I heard Sen. Joseph Lieberman suggesting that Congress should consider creating a tax to fund America's war on terrorism. During a Senate hearing yesterday, the Connecticut Democrat said:
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New Bush Budget Aims to Save Tax Cuts
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2007 CommentCall it Operation Enduring Tax Cuts. President Bush's $2.9 trillion fiscal 2008 budget attempts to balance the federal budget by 2012. According to the proposal, the U.S. government would run a $61 billion surplus that year, though the projected deficits in 2010 ($94.4 billion) and 2011 ($53.8 billion) would be so small relative to the size of a projected $18 trillion economy–0.6 percent and 0.3 percent of gross domestic product–as to be financially insignificant. (And yes, bean counters of America, these numbers do assume that Social Security surpluses are commingled with the rest of tax revenues.)
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Perky Economy Starts to Relieve Worker Angst
Tweet Share on Facebook February 2, 2007 CommentMaybe the U.S. economy added 111,000 jobs last month, but maybe it didn't. Given that the Labor Department later revised higher its monthly jobs numbers 75 percent of the time last year, there's a good chance the final number for January will be somewhere north of 111,000. (More than one economist has called these preliminary payroll numbers "useless.")
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On CEO Pay and Plunging Unemployment
Tweet Share on Facebook February 1, 2007 Comment— President Bush touched on the issue of CEO pay during his economic speech in New York yesterday. Instead of seeking to limit pay through legislation–as congressional Democrats are proposing–Bush went the bully pulpit route and scolded corporate boards for ignoring their responsibilities. "You need to pay attention to the executive compensation packages that you approve," Bush said. "You need to show the world that American businesses are a model of transparency and good corporate governance." But CEO pay hasn't exploded just because of buddy-buddy corporate boards. To a great extent, the sixfold increase in CEO pay between 1980 and 2003 can, according to the research of MIT economist Xavier Gabaix, "be fully attributed to the sixfold increase in market capitalization of large U.S. companies during that period." And the bigger the firms, the more CEOs are paid, which is one reason American CEOs are paid more than their foreign counterparts. There are just a lot more big, successful companies here. And as for the gap between executive pay and worker pay, a lot of the disparity stems from the fact that workers' incomes are dependent on wages while CEOs benefit from the stock market. As I noted in a recent story on income inequality and globalization:
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