James Pethokoukis
Politics and policy from inside Washington
Krugman’s numbers on the Bush tax cuts don’t add up
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Why is Paul Krugman being so unhelpful here:
A few months ago, the Congressional Budget Office released a report on the impact of various tax options. A two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, it estimated, would lower the unemployment rate next year by between 0.1 and 0.3 percentage points compared with what it would be if the tax cuts were allowed to expire; the effect would be about twice as large in 2012. Those are significant numbers, but not huge — certainly not enough to justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears about what will happen if the tax cuts are allowed to end on schedule.
That might be true of the high-end Bush tax cuts, but letting them all expire would chop at least two percentage points off GDP, according to a variety of economic models run by banks and consultants
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James:
Let’s see. Krugman’s been pretty much right about pretty much everything for ten years, whereas those “Banks and consultants” and YOU have been wrong about EVERYTHING.
Therefore, your bald assertion of truth is to be accepted because, of course, Zombie Economics may be dead, but it’s still kicking.
Banks and consultants know way more about economics than a Nobel Prize for Economics winner.