What I Learned from the Fed Challenge
Peter G. Peterson, who sounds made-up but probably isn't, has a good piece in Sunday's Times Magazine about just how screwed over we're all going to be 5, 10, and 20 years down the line thanks to today's tax cuts and resultant deficit spending.
Central bankers usually are reasonable folks, even the ones who previously served in Republican administrations. If the
administration had stepped back and given monetary policy a chance to kick-start the economy instead of throwing our future
away with irresponsible fiscal policy, that would've been something. With inflation looming in the late '90s, no one called
for raising taxes to cut it off. Rescinding any monetary initiatives enacted today is a relatively easy thing to do;
it's hard to get people worked up about interest rate changes. This is opposed to the political nastiness that will ensue a few years from now when whichever Democrats are left in office actually want to uphold the sunset provisions in the current tax cut.
The solution, of course, is to deny Social Security to anyone who votes Republican (which wouldn't be functionally different from the "affluence test" that Peterson proposes, but has the benefit of being much more mean-spirited).
Central bankers usually are reasonable folks, even the ones who previously served in Republican administrations. If the
administration had stepped back and given monetary policy a chance to kick-start the economy instead of throwing our future
away with irresponsible fiscal policy, that would've been something. With inflation looming in the late '90s, no one called
for raising taxes to cut it off. Rescinding any monetary initiatives enacted today is a relatively easy thing to do;
it's hard to get people worked up about interest rate changes. This is opposed to the political nastiness that will ensue a few years from now when whichever Democrats are left in office actually want to uphold the sunset provisions in the current tax cut.
The solution, of course, is to deny Social Security to anyone who votes Republican (which wouldn't be functionally different from the "affluence test" that Peterson proposes, but has the benefit of being much more mean-spirited).
Comments
Post a Comment