Recently released reports from CBPP, EPI, NELP, and PERI:

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

House Unemployment Insurance Proposal Would Harm Jobless Workers, Weaken Economy, and Undermine UI System
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Economic Policy Institute

A jobs-centered approach to African American community development: The crisis of African American unemployment requires federal intervention
Algernon Austin

The Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act: An analysis of job-creation provisions
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December 16, 2011

December 16, 2011 (Prices Byte)

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, December 15, 2011

While interest in a financial speculation tax, also known as a financial transaction tax (FTT), is picking up in the United States, the European Union is getting close to actually approving a tax. As part of this process, the European Commission (EC) had its staff put together a model that would project its impact on investment and growth.

This model, which the staff admits is very much a work in progress, projected that in the long-run the tax would lead to a 1.76 percent decline in output. Opponents of the tax were quick to seize on this projection as a basis for opposing the tax.

As I noted earlier, there are good reasons for questioning this projection from the model. It implies that the cost of financial transactions (a tax would have no different effect than brokerage fees and other trading costs) have an extraordinarily large impact on growth and productivity growth. This is completely at odds with nearly all of the economic literature on growth, which does not mention financial transactions costs at all.

Extrapolating from the model, the decline in the average cost of financial transactions in the United States over the last three decades would explain close to 15 percent of the productivity growth in over this period. If this is true, then the U.S. should anticipate slower productivity growth in the years ahead, since there is little room for transactions costs to decline further, now that they getting close to zero. (The Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget have not incorporated any such slowdown into their growth projections.)

Another implication of the EC model’s projection is that the U.K. could quickly see a jump in its GDP of close to 9 percent if it got rid of its 0.5 percent tax on stock trades. It is unlikely that anyone really believes this. Of course, if the EC model’s projections are accurate then the UK should have seen its GDP increase by close to 9 percentage points above its baseline in the years following 1986. That was the year it lowered its tax from 1.0 percent to 0.5 percent. (There was no increase in growth that was close to this size.)

Diciembre 2011, Mark Weisbrot, Rebecca Ray, Juan A. Montecino y Sara Kozameh