Image Credit: Jay Wescott
On his gatesnotes blog, Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates offers his thoughts about inequality, particularly concerning economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Among his insights: (a) extreme inequality is a societal problem, and government has a ameliorative … read more
The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber is worried that Hillary Clinton hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s not enough for Scheiber that the likely Democratic presidential nominee will almost certainly make inequality a core theme of her 2016 campaign. One can expect calls for universal preschool, a higher minimum wage, and more infrastructure investment among other policies to boost living standards at the middle and bottom. But Scheiber is worried that she won’t take the next step and express a clear desire to sock it to the 1% with a big, fat tax hike. read more
“Let those who will, write the nation’s laws,” economist Paul Samuelson once said, “if I can write its textbooks.” Samuelson may have been more correct than he realized. A new study looks at how public finance textbook treat the issue of raising taxes to pay for government spending on public goods such a roads and bridges. read more
