Josh Barro Profile picture
4 May, 6 tweets, 2 min read
You are rich if you make $500,000 a year, even if you don’t consider yourself rich. Still, Dems will have a hard time agreeing to raise taxes on the rich, since some congressional Dems want to tie it to a big tax cut for the rich — SALT. businessinsider.com/people-who-mak…
Low interest rates are also a barrier to tax hikes in 2021. The usual argument for raising taxes is “someone has to pay for this.” But does someone? The ease with which we can borrow makes spending easy and taxing hard. businessinsider.com/people-who-mak…
(One thing people forget on SALT is it’s not *just* a sop to rich Democrats in blue states — public employee unions care about restoring the deduction because it makes it easier for states to tax rich people and spend the proceeds. So the issue has more legs than you’d think.)
This is a reason MMT’s inversion of the fiscal and monetary functions is so dumb — good luck selling taxes like this! Also the rich may not adjust consumption if taxed more — you have to tax the masses to fight inflation fiscally.
MMT did not “win” any arguments, what we’re doing now is Keynesianism with correct parameters. If you get the government to start using monetary policy to finance spending and fiscal policy to control inflation (lol) then you can say MMT won.
It’s just so insane, you’re going to raise the payroll tax or whatever (higher capital gains rates will not fight inflation) and tell voters “this isn’t to finance spending, it’s to reduce your income so you spend less and inflation is lower.”

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More from @jbarro

3 May
This sounds like a policy dispute, not a “bullying” concern.
Like, maybe Scott Stringer is personally nasty, but "threatened to oppose me politically if I did not line up with him on this issue" is in-bounds elected official behavior. Nobody would care if they thought Stringer was in the right on the underlying policy.
What happened to "politics ain't beanbag"?
Read 7 tweets
2 May
Is there a reason that everyone on Long Island drives like they have a death wish?
I used to think Long Island and Northern New Jersey were essentially the same thing but the drivers are much better in New Jersey.
Long Island drivers love to:
-Follow too closely
-Weave in and out of traffic
-Change lanes without signaling
-Illegally cross the HOV lane divider on the LIE
-Make visibly exasperated gestures when any vehicle is in their way
Read 6 tweets
29 Apr
I am skeptical about the political power of school opening. Only about 1/4 of voters have school age kids at home. Many are in states like FL where there's full in-person. Many others are wary of reopening. But many conservative writers live in slow-opening blue jurisdictions...
Where you need to be for this to matter politically -- a slow-opening jurisdiction in a swing state, and a parent who wanted schools more open -- it's actually a very small slice of the electorate. Obviously everything is on the margin, and I support more opening on the merit.
And of course this issue will all be over by September. Even in California, you have state lawmakers talking about how they'll force the districts open in the fall.
Read 4 tweets
27 Apr
What a lot of people seem to want in the argument over outdoor masking is for people on the street to stop judging them. Well, the government can't stop people from judging you. But you can control whether you care. businessinsider.com/cdc-guidance-o…
One thing I'm looking forward to about the end of the pandemic is a return to people minding their own business. You can start by taking off your mask outside if you feel like it and not concerning yourself with whether other people do likewise. businessinsider.com/cdc-guidance-o…
See, this reader email is not an example of people learning to mind their own business again. Image
Read 4 tweets
22 Apr
Andrew Yang has confessed to naming his pecs, sentencing will be in three weeks.
Anyway look: Yang is pretty much unqualified to be mayor. His campaign is very vague. So it’s weird that so much of the critique of him is (1) he doesn’t follow the social mores of the progressive borg that dominates activism and media and (2) they dislike his personality.
Read 4 tweets
22 Apr
"Mr. Menchaca, who cannot run for the City Council again because of term limits, said he hoped to work in a Yang administration should Mr. Yang win." Yeah no shit, this is a naked ambition move, kind of hilarious. But Menchaca is bad and I hope Yang stiffs him if he wins.
It's amazing how much of NY politics is operating openly on the idea that Yang is an empty vessel you can fill with whatever you want.
Not necessarily a wrong idea, to be clear. Yang is practically hinting that he'd make Kathryn Garcia first deputy mayor and let her run the city. Which wouldn't be the worst possibility, but then the question is, why not just make her mayor?
Read 5 tweets

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