Clark Center Forum

 

 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

The 9% cumulative increase in real US median household income since 1980 substantially understates how much better off people in the median American household are now economically, compared with 35 years ago. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

Californians would be better off on average if all final users in the state paid the same price for water — adjusted for quality, place and time — even if, as a result, some food prices rose sharply and some farms failed. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

The Fed should wait until its preferred measure of inflation (Core PCE) is clearly rising — and not just forecast to rise — before it begins hiking interest rates.  

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A)  Giving tax incentives to specific firms to locate operations in a city or state typically generates local benefits that outweigh the costs to the city and/or state providing the incentives.

B) The US as a whole benefits when cities or states compete with each other by giving tax incentives to firms to locate operations in their jurisdictions. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

A) Declining to be vaccinated against contagious diseases such as measles imposes costs on other people, which is a negative externality.

B) Considering the costs of restricting free choice, and the share of people in the US who choose not to vaccinate their children for measles, the social benefit of mandating measles vaccines for all Americans (except those with compelling medical reasons) would exceed the social cost. 

Last year Chris Said, who is now a data scientist at Twitter, created a tool for summarizing the answers from the experts panel so that anyone could see which expert they would be most similar to. Chris has updated his analysis to include the 2014 questions and answers. If you are interesting in taking his […] 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statement:

In 10 years, per capita purchasing power in Greece will be higher if — rather than continuing to service its debts over the next decade and complying with the budget rules currently in place — it refuses to accept a continuation of its current troika program and explicitly defaults on its debt held by the official sector. 

This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:

A)  Changing federal income tax rates, or the income bases to which those rates apply, can affect federal tax revenues partly by altering people’s behavior, and thus their actual or reported incomes.

B)  To the extent that a given tax change might affect revenues partly by affecting national-income growth, existing research provides enough guidance to generate informative bounds on the size of any growth-driven revenue effect.

C)  For large proposed changes in tax rates or the tax base, official revenue forecasts provided to Congress would probably be more accurate if the CBO and JCT tried to estimate fully how the proposed tax changes would affect growth-driven revenue.