The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
-Will Rogers
Who knew tax cuts would be so difficult?
Victory lap (of sorts)
Blogging can get back to a semi-regular thing for a while now. I had two presentations taking most of my time these last couple of weeks. I will present some economic analysis ideas to a group of Veteran Entrepreneurs later this month so I had to get worksheets and such ready for them. Next week I will be presenting at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve bank so I had to get that done as well. That and department chair duties is enough to keep anybody busy.
“Permanent” v. “Temporary” Tax Changes
Paul Ryan is pressing hard for tax changes to be permanent rather than temporary (see a representative article here). From a traditional economic perspective he is probably right to do so if he wants policy to have maximum impact on the economy, regardless of your preferred performance metric. There exists no shortage of empirical research on this topic and I include a link here to a research note that seems typical (and more importantly is not paywalled).