Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
I'm not sure who invented the term "deficit hawk," but it seems an odd name for a creature too chicken to raise taxes. The bird is strange in color, too — in Republican red, Democratic blue or Blue Dog purple.
Most politicians refused to get specific about the federal budget until after the election, then stood around waiting for bipartisan groups to stick their necks out. We have now heard from the chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan deficit reduction commission and the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the feathers are flying.
Both plans propose cuts in taxes on individual and corporate tax rates, counterbalanced by elimination of some big tax breaks. Both also propose taxing at least one liquid whose consumption we want to discourage: gasoline or sugary drinks. The Bipartisan Policy Center would also impose a 6.5 percent national sales tax.
Both plans also propose cuts in military spending, Medicare and Social Security. A concise overview in USA Today described the response this way: "near-unanimous opposition from right and left." While this characterization seems accurate, it elides important differences in the reasons for opposition.
Most critics on the right don't like the proposed tax increases; most on the left argue that we shouldn't obsess about the budget until we get the unemployment rate down and the economic growth rate back up.
In other words, both plans to cut the deficit are hawkish, and the response to them largely represents hawks revealing their inner chickens.
Many discussions of the deficit frame the issue primarily as tax increases versus spending cuts. The New York Times published a "deficit puzzle" last week that enables readers to pick and choose from both sides of this ledger, deciding how to reduce the projected deficit for 2030 by about $1.3 trillion, by coloring in blocks representing $1 billion each.
It's an educational exercise that helps focus attention on specifics, even if one disagrees with the way some of the specifics are framed. I've handed it out to my undergraduates, asking them to write a brief essay defending their choices.
But I would prefer a different framework, one that sorts proposed policies according to their distributional impact: Who will benefit, and who will be hurt?
In some cases, the distributional impact is obvious: Allowing expiration of the Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000 will primarily hurt families at the very top. Also, we know that low-income families depend more heavily on Medicare and Social Security than others and would be likely to be hurt most by cuts there.
Some proposed tax increases "“ such as a national sales tax or a tax on carbon emissions (unaccompanied by any compensatory transfers) "“ would also hit low-income families very hard. And many proposed spending cuts would affect families, who are, for instance, major beneficiaries of Medicare spending.
Indeed, the conservative critique of spending programs is most powerful when it calls attention to public subsidies of "McMansions and gold-plated insurance plans," as Ross Douthat wrote in an Op-Ed column in The New York Times on Nov. 14.
The distributional impact of some proposals is hard to ascertain. Over the last five years, many young people have entered the armed forces in part because they couldn't find a decent civilian job. How will cuts in military spending, then, affect the unemployment rate?
The effect of reducing the tax break for employer-provided health care depends largely on the as-yet-uncertain future of a much larger package of health care changes.
In my experience, most college seniors can't accurately define a regressive tax (one that takes a larger percentage bite out of low incomes than high ones) and even fewer realize that the regressive structure of state taxes largely counterbalances the progressive structure of the federal income tax.
This leads me to believe that most voters don't have a clear idea of how current proposals for deficit reduction will affect them personally.
Several different Web sites provide great tools for unpacking the federal budget, including those provided by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the National Priorities Project.
Has anyone out there designed a simple model that could provide the basis for a Web-based calculator allowing individuals to enter their personal and family characteristics and get answers to questions like: Where do I sit in the income distribution? How are these policies likely to affect my pocketbook?
Such a calculator could help raise the level of public debate. It could also help voters see what's going on underneath the feathers.
To grow or remain prosperous, a nation needs a reasonable, competent, honest government, and India and China still have much to do, an economist writes.
Missing from the recent proposals and how to cut the budget deficit through spending cuts and tax increases is any analysis of which people are most affected by what, an economist writes.
Eric Cantor says value-added taxes wouldn’t work in the United States because they’re too closely associated with Europe’s “social welfare” state. But are they?
Taxes have a cost — and not just for the people paying them, an economist writes.
Every available piece of evidence seems to suggest that the Bush tax cuts did little to lift growth.
To reduce the federal deficit, Americans should recognize that taxes are too low and health care costs are out of control, an economist writes.
Start fixing the budget deficit by overhauling the overly complex and out-of-date tax system, an economist writes.
A budget reflects a nation’s priorities and should be determined by the people and their legislators, while economists can best be used to help decide which options best serve those priorities, an economist writes.
Is economic growth a means, or an end? That question surfaces again and again in the United Nations Development Project’s latest Human Development Report.
Cartoons, graphic art and “graphic recordings” are enlivening presentations of economics in many forums, an economist writes.
Catherine Rampell is the economics editor at nytimes.com.
David Leonhardt writes the Economic Scene column, which appears in The Times on Wednesdays.
Motoko Rich is an economics reporter for The New York Times.
Michael Powell is an economics reporter for The New York Times.
Steven Greenhouse writes about labor and workplace issues for The New York Times.
Liz Alderman writes about European economics, finance and business from Paris.
Sewell Chan writes about economic issues from Washington D.C.
Jack Ewing writes about European economics and business from Frankfurt.
Economists offer readers insights about the dismal science.
Economics doesn’t have to be complicated. It is the study of our lives "” our jobs, our homes, our families and the little decisions we face every day. Here at Economix, David Leonhardt, Catherine Rampell and other contributors will analyze the news and use economics as a framework for thinking about the world. We welcome feedback, at economix@nytimes.com.
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Special Features The Debt TrapA series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.
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An accounting of the government’s rescue package.
Three economists explain what worked and what didn't.
A map of unemployment rates across the United States, now through January.
Faces, numbers and stories from behind the downturn.
A series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.
A series exploring the origins of the financial crisis, from Washington to Wall Street.
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