Wall Street Journal
Peggy Noonan's column about the budget in last Friday's Wall Street Journal (I could probably stop here and know that I've said all that needs to be said) shows why someone who doesn't know anything about the budget or economy shouldn't write about them.
One sentence in particular caught my eye:
"People are freshly aware and concerned about the real-world implications of a $1.6 trillion dollar deficit..."
Peggy...Has anyone ever told you that you have to consider the economic context in which a deficit occurs? A deficit even half that size when the economy was growing, like the ones that happened during Bush 43, were indeed a disaster. But last year's deficit of $1.4 trillion, which occurred when monetary policy was having no effect and when businesses and consumers weren't spending, not only was the correct fiscal policy, it was a triumph. The same will be true this year if the deficit is $1.6 trillion.
I missed this when it occurred a little over a week ago, but the Wall Street Journal is now saying the term "death tax" should not be used by its reporters when writing about estate taxes.
Here's the money quote:
"...the term death tax has become too politicized to be of any use except in editorials. Bury it."
This sudden and dramatic drop in temperature in Hell apparently was prompted by what the Journal said was negative reader reaction to this story on October 31 with the lead "With the federal estate tax disappearing for most people, state death taxes have emerged as a surprise new worry."
As I posted at the time, the Journal needed to correct itself and apologize. It just did one of those explicitly and one implicitly.
The Wall Street Journal should be so ashamed of this that it should voluntarily print not just a correction but also an apology. This lead and third graph are reprehensible:
With the federal estate tax disappearing for most people, state death taxes have emerged as a surprise new worry.
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That is down from the 17,500 estates that would have faced death taxes under the previous $2 million limit, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates.
As I've said before, an estate tax doesn't tax death any more than the income tax taxes life.
(Hat tip to TPM.)
In my Roll Call column this week, I take another shot at the Gallup poll on waste from about 10 days ago and on Steve Moore's characterization of that poll. Thanks. for listening. I feel much better now.
Waste Not, Want Not — but First Define Waste and Want
Sept. 29, 2009
Gallup released a poll two weeks ago that unwittingly but perfectly explains the ever-intractable politics of the federal budget. The poll, which was released Sept. 15, found that the average American believes that 50 cents of every tax dollar collected by the federal government is wasted.
Steve Moore wrote a column published by the Wall Street Journal yesterday that tried very hard to use the results of a recent Gallup poll to convince everyone a massive taxpayer revolt is close at hand. There are two problems: He's misreading the poll and he's doesn't understand its implications.
I wish I could tell you that the timing of this week's "Fiscal Fitness" and this article in today's Wall Street Journal by Glenn Hubbard and John Cogan was choreographed. It wasn't.
John Fund's well-written piece in the today's Wall Street Journal online about earmarks overstates the case and misses the point.
Yes, President Bush has the ability not to spend many of the earmarks Republican and Democrats listed in the report accompanying the omnibus spending bill he signed in December, but doing so is likely to cause him political harm rather than establish the positive legacy Fund thinks will occur.
Even by its usual highly partisan position, an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal dealing with the pay-as-you-go rule is so extreme that it deserves to be debunked almost line by line.
