Two more on the economy and the Treasury Department…
First up, the Tresury Department released a notice during the September bailout hullabaloo that could give banks a windfall up to $140 billion due to tax policy change. Tax experts and congressional members have weighed in on this change, calling it everything from exceeding authority to illegal.
And [...]
UPDATE: And some more on New Deal economics on his blog.
More Wall Street goodness here:
In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.
That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.
Those 2007 bonuses were paid [...]
Krugman and every other economist/analyst I’ve heard over the last few days come to the same conclusion when talking about McCain and Clinton’s proposed gas tax holiday.
Pointless and borderline pandering for votes.
Here’s Krugman’s take:
Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a [...]
Percentage gains in after-tax income from 2003 to 2005:
Bottom quintile: 2%
Next quintile: 2.4%
Middle quintile: 3.9%
Fourth quintile: 3.7%
Top quintile: 16%
Top 10%: 20.9%
Top 5%: 27.7%
Top 1%: 43.5%
According to Krugman’s analysis of the CBO’s Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates report released recently.
It was a boom, all right — but only for a few people.
Yup.
I mentioned income gaps a couple weeks ago… and Krugman has an astonishing quote in a recent interview with Mario Cuomo.
bq.. Cuomo: I was interested especially in education, where I think it’s very possible for people to say, look, one out of four of our workers are high-skilled, which is roughly four years after high [...]
