A Fiscal Cliff

A Fiscal Cliff PDF Author: John Merrifield
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1948647893
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
"'A Fiscal Cliff' is precisely the right book for perilous fiscal times. Giants in economics and public policy offer a spirited defense of fiscal rules critically needed to protect our children and grandchildren from a bleak future." -Richard K. Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus, Ohio University/p> The unsustainable, and still rapidly growing, U.S. federal government debt is a classic case of ‘'in denial.” Indeed, we are no closer to a solution to the debt crisis than we were ten years ago when the Simpson-Bowles Commission issued a report with recommendations to address the nation's debt crisis. The bipartisan Commission fell short of the supermajority vote required to submit their recommendations to Congress. President Trump declared a debt crisis, but didn't act like it. Various commissions and think tanks have made numerous recommendations. In 2019, a Congressional Committee was appointed to recommend budget process reforms, but that Committee could not agree on any recommendations to submit to Congress. While the dominant sentiment is that maybe if we ignore it, it will just go away, the debt crisis will not just vanish. A Fiscal Cliff: New Perspectives on the U.S. Debt Crisis is a timely addition to a critical policy discussion.

A Fiscal Cliff

A Fiscal Cliff PDF Author: John Merrifield
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1948647893
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 616

Get Book Here

Book Description
"'A Fiscal Cliff' is precisely the right book for perilous fiscal times. Giants in economics and public policy offer a spirited defense of fiscal rules critically needed to protect our children and grandchildren from a bleak future." -Richard K. Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus, Ohio University/p> The unsustainable, and still rapidly growing, U.S. federal government debt is a classic case of ‘'in denial.” Indeed, we are no closer to a solution to the debt crisis than we were ten years ago when the Simpson-Bowles Commission issued a report with recommendations to address the nation's debt crisis. The bipartisan Commission fell short of the supermajority vote required to submit their recommendations to Congress. President Trump declared a debt crisis, but didn't act like it. Various commissions and think tanks have made numerous recommendations. In 2019, a Congressional Committee was appointed to recommend budget process reforms, but that Committee could not agree on any recommendations to submit to Congress. While the dominant sentiment is that maybe if we ignore it, it will just go away, the debt crisis will not just vanish. A Fiscal Cliff: New Perspectives on the U.S. Debt Crisis is a timely addition to a critical policy discussion.

The Fiscal Cliff

The Fiscal Cliff PDF Author: Edward Poteat
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781491290989
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Many American cities are under fiscal assault. Rising pension costs, diminishing tax bases, and middle class flight have created a fiscal cliff for many American cities. Many cities have already become dysfunctional and unable to meet their basic responsibilities of providing adequate public safety, housing, education opportunities, and health care to its citizenry. Worst yet, due to middle class flight and the corresponding flight of jobs, the citizenry in these cities have a greater and greater concentration of poverty. These “declining” cities are less able to provide basic services to a citizenry which is in greater need of those services. The bankruptcy filing of Detroit is only the tip of the iceberg. Unless solutions are identified and enacted quickly, many more American cities will face Detroit's fate. The Fiscal Cliff describes the intricacies of the fiscal problems encountered by many American cities and identifies solutions which address these issues. Mayors of these declining cities continue to grope for idyllic and quick fix solutions to their declining tax base such as casinos or convention centers. However, the solutions to these vexing problems must be predicated on a correct understanding of the problem. Declining cities have undergone decades of structural change to its population and economic base. The Fiscal Cliff proposes real solutions which acknowledge these structural changes. The Fiscal Cliff is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in social inequality, urban planning, or urban politics..The writing style is not academic but one which many readers can easily relate to (i.e Jane Jacobs meets Malcolm Gladwell). Over 13,000,000 people live in declining American cities. If the municipalities these people live in cannot provide them with basic public services such as heath care, education, public safety or decent housing, it should be a concern for every American.

Perpetuating American Greatness After the Fiscal Cliff

Perpetuating American Greatness After the Fiscal Cliff PDF Author: Stephen J. Feinberg
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1475975929
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The federal government has failed to adequately regulate free market capitalism in the United States. Understanding how we got to this point is the first step in figuring out how to fix the economy. It is still possible to help the forgotten middle class, create jobs, and provide mortgage relief to homeowners. In this guidebook to perpetuating American greatness, Stephen J. Feinberg introduces Jump Start America Bonds to encourage cash-rich businesses and individuals to invest in transportation infrastructure construction projects to create jobs. He proposes a US mortgage court to oversee the restructuring of home mortgages on terms that would give relief to homeowners and end the housing crisis. He also explores other key issues, such as the federal deficit, income and estate tax fairness, and ways to better regulate banks and the securities markets. Throughout his study, Feinberg seeks to help America recover by providing a concrete plan to reverse the economic decline and return the country to economic greatness once again.

Fiscal Therapy

Fiscal Therapy PDF Author: William G. Gale
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190645431
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Keeping the economy strong will require addressing two distinct but related problems. Steadily rising federal debt makes it harder to grow our economy, boost our living standards, respond to wars or recessions, address social needs, and maintain our role as a global leader. At the same time, we have let critical investments lag and left many people behind even as overall prosperity has grown. In Fiscal Therapy, William Gale, a leading authority on how federal tax and budget policy affects the economy, provides a trenchant discussion of the challenges posed by the imbalances between spending and revenue. America is facing a gradual decline as debt accumulates and delay raises the costs of action. But there is hope: fiscal responsibility aligns with both conservative and liberal goals and citizens of all stripes can support the notion of making life better for our children and grandchildren. Gale provides a plan to make the economy and nation stronger, one that controls entitlement spending but preserves and enhances their anti-poverty and social insurance roles, increases public investments on human and physical capital, and raises and reforms taxes to pay for government services in a fair and efficient way. What is needed, he argues, is to balance today's needs against tomorrow's obligations. We face significant fiscal challenges but, if we are wise enough to seize our opportunities, we can strengthen our economy, increase opportunity, reduce inequality, and build better lives for our children and grandchildren. We do not have to kill popular programs or starve government. Indeed, one main goal of fiscal reform is to maintain the vital functions that government provides. We need to act responsibly, pay for the government we want, and shape that government in ways that serve us best.

Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue

Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue PDF Author: Michael Keen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691199981
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
An engaging and enlightening account of taxation told through lively, dramatic, and sometimes ludicrous stories drawn from around the world and across the ages Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts—and, in repressing it, ended up burning the very huts they intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly, as when, in eighteenth-century Britain, a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book, two leading authorities on taxation, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod, provide a fascinating and informative tour through these and many other episodes in tax history, both preposterous and dramatic—from the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered) Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way, readers meet a colorful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax heroes. While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on ships that tended to make them sink, Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday’s tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England’s window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great’s tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like today’s carbon taxes aim to slow global warming. Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue is a surprising and one-of-a-kind account of how history illuminates the perennial challenges and timeless principles of taxation—and how the past holds clues to solving the tax problems of today.

Debtors' Prison

Debtors' Prison PDF Author: Robert Kuttner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307959813
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year. Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts. In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.

The Price of Politics

The Price of Politics PDF Author: Bob Woodward
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471133877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
Based on 18 months of reporting, Woodward's 17th book is an intimate, documented examination of how President Obama and the highest profile Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States Congress attempted to restore the American economy and improve the federal government's fiscal condition over three and one half years. Drawn from memos, contemporaneous meeting notes, emails and in-depth interviews with the central players, THE PRICE OF POLITICS addresses the key issue of the presidential and congressional campaigns: the condition of the American economy and how and why we got there. Providing verbatim, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour accounts, the book shows what really happened, what drove the debates, negotiations and struggles that define, and will continue to define, the American future.

Fear City

Fear City PDF Author: Kim Phillips-Fein
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0805095268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

This Time Is Different

This Time Is Different PDF Author: Carmen M. Reinhart
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691152640
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.

Red Ink

Red Ink PDF Author: David Wessel
Publisher: Crown Pub
ISBN: 0770436145
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Presents a narrative analysis of the federal budget that reveals how funds were actually spent in 2011, evaluating the roles of such contributors as Jacob Lew, Douglas Elmendorf, and Pete Peterson.