November 15, 2010
File under: Tooting our own horn. CEPR’s had a few good days getting cited in some the hottest policy debates going on. Here are my two favorites:
In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich cites CEPR co-director Dean Baker in his column, Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?
The economist Dean Baker calculated that the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which “isn’t enough to hire anyone.”
And today at the Washington Post, Ezra Klein highlights in his post, Four budget calculators, one story, CEPR’s budget deficit calculators:
The New York Times’ deficit-reduction calculator is worth playing around with, though the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget’s calculator is more comprehensive, and the calculator from the Center for Economic and Policy Research works harder to include policies that are too often left out of the mainstream debate. But they’re all good, clean fun, and they all make the same basic point: It’s the health-care system, stupid.
…In some ways, my favorite budget calculator is an older one released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. This calculator doesn’t give you any viable choices. Instead it allows you to plug in the per-capita health-care spending of other countries and then see what happens to our deficit. I’ve looked at this dozens of times, and I still find it startling: If we spent what high-performing, fully universal systems like France and Germany spend, we’d have no budget deficit.
And BTW this morning, Dean Baker thoroughly debunked in his Beat the Press post, The NYT Doesn’t Know That We Have 15 Million People Unemployed, the NYT deficit calculator referenced by Ezra Klein above.
