Sunday, June 08, 2008

Obama is bad for the American Worker

From Greg Mankiw.

In a 2006 study, the economist William C. Randolph of the Congressional Budget Office estimated who wins and who loses from this tax. He concluded that “domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden.”

Despite these findings, a corporate tax cut as a way to help workers may strike some people as needlessly indirect. Why not just pass an income tax cut aimed squarely at working families, as Senator Barack Obama proposes?

The answer is that while most taxes distort incentives and shrink the economic pie, they do not do so equally. Compared with other ways of funding the government, the corporate tax is particularly hard on economic growth. A C.B.O. report in 2005 concluded that the “distortions that the corporate income tax induces are large compared with the revenues that the tax generates.” Reducing these distortions would lead to better-paying jobs.

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