Fiscal Policy

Corporate America makes sport of gaming the tax authorities, especially after decades of budget cuts to the IRS. What dominant corporations make by hiring expensive tax and lobby teams to distort the rules in their favor, smaller businesses, workers, and the general public are forced to cover with higher taxes and worsened services. Competition shouldn’t hinge on who has more pull over the tax rules and how they’re enforced. Decisions made over the next year to modernize the IRS present a historic opportunity to shape a less entrenched and more competitive economy, writes Niko Lusiani.

Economists have proposed two main theories to explain the recent spike in prices. Progressives have attributed the rise in inflation to corporate greed and have suggested price controls in response. Other economists have turned back to the New Consensus in Macroeconomics that arose in the 1970s in response to steep inflation blamed on the large Keynesian fiscal expansion of the preceding decades. Matías Vernengo writes that neither camp has correctly diagnosed the problems with current inflation. Proponents of Greedflation overlook the price stability of the last few decades even as market concentration increased. On the other hand, advocates of the New Consensus similarly forget their history and the commodity shocks and price-wage spiral that were the real culprit for inflation in the 1970s.

Some progressive politicians and advocates have argued that lax antitrust policies enabled the inflation surge that began in 2021 and that aggressive antitrust enforcement is crucial to combatting inflation. These assertions are misguided and misleading. Similar greedflation theories emerged during previous inflation spikes, but their promotion this time has proven counterproductive. The allure of trustbusting ideas, it seems, is starting to wane.

Kurt Davis Jr. argues that the U.S. Congress should consider switching from a federal debt ceiling as a nominal value to one fixed as a percentage of GDP. This debt ceiling should, on the one hand, be high enough that the government cannot reasonably cross it, but punitive enough that it disincentivizes profligate spending. This will save the U.S. from the annual political theater that occurs around debt ceiling talks and focus the discussion on the federal budget (and potentially taking revenue and spending decisions to actually control the deficit).

Niko Lusiani and Susan Holmberg write that the United States should tax profitable corporations not just to raise revenue and redistribute unequal gains but...

Efficiency is out and political economy is in. But what does that imply about making good policy? When Barack Obama was asked about carbon pricing...

It has become fashionable for governments to issue “green” bonds to fund the transition to sustainability. However, sovereign green bonds as currently designed have...

The US stands out among developed economies for its comparatively low level of redistribution as a percentage of GDP. Gustavo de Souza examines the...