100 ECONOMISTS: Obama’s Tax Plan=Deep Recession

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Yeah, it’s from the McCain camp, but let’s not just completely blow off and ignore what 100 economists say…if for no other reason than Obama’s math doesn’t add up (link).

You can’t tax 5% of the American workforce with another $1,200,000,000,000 and expect those same people to INCREASE their spending on investments (especially when they stand to make less on investments as he’s raising the capital gains tax), to increase hiring, and to increase payscales. It doesn’t work.

ARLINGTON, VA — Today, McCain-Palin 2008 released the following statement signed by 100 distinguished and experienced economists at major American universities and research organizations, including five Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith. The economists explain why Barack Obama’s proposals, including “misguided tax hikes,” would “decrease the number of jobs in America.” The prospects of such tax rate increases under Barack Obama are already harming the economy. The economists conclude that “Barack Obama’s economic proposals are wrong for the American economy.” The proposals “defy both economic reason and economic experience.”

The full economists’ statement on Barack Obama’s economic proposals and a complete list of economists who support it follows:

Barack Obama argues that his proposals to raise tax rates and halt international trade agreements would benefit the American economy. They would do nothing of the sort. Economic analysis and historical experience show that they would do the opposite. They would reduce economic growth and decrease the number of jobs in America. Moreover, with the credit crunch, the housing slump, and high energy prices weakening the U.S. economy, his proposals run a high risk of throwing the economy into a deep recession. It was exactly such misguided tax hikes and protectionism, enacted when the U.S. economy was weak in the early 1930s, that greatly increased the severity of the Great Depression.

We are very concerned with Barack Obama’s opposition to trade agreements such as the pending one with Colombia, the new one with Central America, or the established one with Canada and Mexico. Exports from the United States to other countries create jobs for Americans. Imports make goods available to Americans at lower prices and are a particular benefit to families and individuals with low incomes. International trade is also a powerful source of strength in a weak economy. In the second quarter of this year, for example, increased international trade did far more to stimulate the U.S. economy than the federal government’s “stimulus” package.

Ironically, rather than supporting international trade, Barack Obama is now proposing yet another so-called stimulus package, which would do very little to grow the economy. And his proposal to finance the package with higher taxes on oil would raise oil prices directly and by reducing exploration and production.

We are equally concerned with his proposals to increase tax rates on labor income and investment. His dividend and capital gains tax increases would reduce investment and cut into the savings of millions of Americans. His proposals to increase income and payroll tax rates would discourage the formation and expansion of small businesses and reduce employment and take-home pay, as would his mandates on firms to provide expensive health insurance.

After hearing such economic criticism of his proposals, Barack Obama has apparently suggested to some people that he might postpone his tax increases, perhaps to 2010. But it is a mistake to think that postponing such tax increases would prevent their harmful effect on the economy today. The prospect of such tax rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy. Businesses considering whether to hire workers today and expand their operations have time horizons longer than a year or two, so the prospect of higher taxes starting in 2009 or 2010 reduces hiring and investment in 2008.

In sum, Barack Obama’s economic proposals are wrong for the American economy. They defy both economic reason and economic experience.

Robert Barro, Harvard University

Gary Becker, University of Chicago

Sanjai Bhagat, University of Colorado

Michael Block, University of Arizona

Brock Blomberg, Claremont-McKenna University

Michael Bordo, Rutgers University

Michael Boskin, Stanford University

Ike Brannon, McCain-Palin 2008

James Buchanan, George Mason University

Todd Buchholtz, Two Oceans Fund

Charles Calomiris, Columbia University

Jim Carter, Vienna VA

Barry Chiswick, University of Illinois at Chicago

John Cogan, Hoover Institution

Kathleen Cooper, Southern Methodist University

Ted Covey, McLean VA

Dan Crippen, former CBO Director

Mario Crucini, Vanderbilt

Steve Davis, University of Chicago

Christopher DeMuth, American Enterprise Institute

William Dewald, Ohio State University

Frank Diebold, University of Pennsylvania

Isaac Ehrlich, State University of New York at Buffalo

Paul Evans, Ohio State University

Dan Feenberg, NBER

Martin Feldstein, Harvard University

Eric Fisher, California Polytechnic State University

Kristin Forbes, MIT

Timothy Fuerst, Bowling Green State University

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Hudson Institute

Paul Gregory, University of Houston

Earl Grinols, Baylor University

Rik Hafer, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Gary Hansen, UCLA

Eric Hanushek, Hoover Institutions

Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute

Arlene Holen, Technology Policy Institute

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain-Palin 2008

Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University

Owen Irvine, Michigan State University

Mike Jensen, Harvard University

Steven Kaplan, University of Chicago

Robert King, Boston University

Meir Kohn, Dartmouth

Marvin Kosters, American Enterprise Institute

Anne Krueger, Johns Hopkins University

Phil Levy, American Enterprise Institute

Larry Lindsey, The Lindsey Group

Paul W. MacAvoy. Yale University

John Makin, American Enterprise Institute

Burton Malkiel, Princeton University

Bennett McCallum, Carnegie-Mellon University

Paul McCracken, University of Michigan

Will Melick, Kenyon College

Allan Meltzer, Carnegie-Mellon University

Enrique Mendoza, University of Maryland

Jim Miller, George Mason University

Michael Moore, George Washington University

Robert Mundell, Columbia University

Tim Muris, George Mason University

Kevin Murphy, University of Chicago

Richard Muth, Emory University

Charles Nelson, University of Washington

Bill Niskanen, Cato Institute

June O’Neill, Baruch College, CUNY

Lydia Ortega, San Jose State University

Steve Parente, University of Minnesota

William Poole, University of Delaware

Michael Porter, Harvard University

Barry Poulson, University of Colorado, Boulder

Edward Prescott, Arizona State University

Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard University

Richard Roll, UCLA

Harvey Rosen, Princeton University

Robert Rossana, Wayne State University

Mark Rush, University of Florida

Tom Saving, Texas A&M University

Anna Schwartz, NBER

George Shultz, Stanford University

Chester Spatt, Carnegie-Mellon University

David Spencer, Brigham Young University

Beryl Sprinkle, Former Chair Council of Economic Advisers

Houston Stokes, University of Illinois in Chicago

Robert Tamura, Clemson University

Jack Tatum, Indiana State University

John Taylor, Stanford University

Richard Vedder, Ohio University

William B. Walstad, University of Nebraska

Murray Weidenbaum, Washington University in St. Louis

Arnold Zellner, University of Chicago

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Mike, I’m surprised you missed this:
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12342127

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Doug,

Always so quick to throw smelly things……………
Personally – I would rather have 100 names I can check for accuracy than ZERO names…. from a publication that shows this on their “about” page:

About The Economist

• About our History

It is not only The Economist’s name that people find baffling. Here are some other common questions.

First, why does it call itself a newspaper? Even when The Economist incorporated the Bankers’ Gazette and Railway Monitor from 1845 to 1932, it also described itself as “a political, literary and general newspaper”.

It still does so because, in addition to offering analysis and opinion, it tries in each issue to cover the main events—business and political—of the week. It goes to press on Thursdays and, printed simultaneously in six countries, is available in most of the world’s main cities the following day or soon after.

Readers everywhere get the same editorial matter. The advertisements differ. The running order of the sections, and sometimes the cover, also differ. But the words are the same, except that each week readers in Britain get a few extra pages devoted to British news.

Why is it anonymous? Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed, often disputed, each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.”

Who owns The Economist? Since 1928, half the shares have been owned by the Financial Times, a subsidiary of Pearson, the other half by a group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff. The editor’s independence is guaranteed by the existence of a board of trustees, which formally appoints him and without whose permission he cannot be removed.

What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? “It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper’s historical position.” That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.

Lastly, The Economist believes in plain language. Walter Bagehot, our most famous 19th-century editor, tried “to be conversational, to put things in the most direct and picturesque manner, as people would talk to each other in common speech, to remember and use expressive colloquialisms”. That remains the style of the paper today.

Established in 1843 to campaign on one of the great political issues of the day, The Economist remains, in the second half of its second century, true to the principles of its founder. James Wilson, a hat maker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, believed in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. Though the protectionist Corn Laws which inspired Wilson to start The Economist were repealed in 1846, the newspaper has lived on, never abandoning its commitment to the classical 19th-century Liberal ideas of its founder.

The Corn Laws, which by taxing and restricting imports of corn made bread expensive and starvation common, were bad for Britain. Free trade, in Wilson’s view, was good for everyone. In his prospectus for The Economist, he wrote: “If we look abroad, we see within the range of our commercial intercourse whole islands and continents, on which the light of civilisation has scarce yet dawned; and we seriously believe that free trade, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilisation and morality throughout the world – yes, to extinguish slavery itself.”

Wilson’s outlook was, therefore, moral, even civilising, but not moralistic. He believed “that reason is given to us to sit in judgment over the dictates of our feelings.” Reason convinced him in particular that Adam Smith was right, that through its invisible hand the market benefited profit-seeking individuals (of whom he was one) and society alike. He was himself a manufacturer and wanted especially to influence “men of business”. Accordingly, he insisted that all the arguments and propositions put forward in his paper should be subjected to the test of facts. That was why it was called The Economist.

Wilson was not The Economist’s greatest editor in terms of intellect. That title probably goes to his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot (pronounced Bajut), who was the paper’s third editor, from 1861 to 1877. Bagehot was a banker, but he is best remembered for his political writing and notably for his articles on the British constitution. The monarch, he argued, was head of the “dignified” parts of the constitution, those that “excite and preserve the reverence of the population”; the prime minister was head of the “efficient” parts, “those by which it, in fact, works and rules.” The distinction is often drawn, even today.

It was Bagehot who broadened the range of the paper into politics. He was also responsible for greatly strengthening the interest in America that The Economist has always shown. Under the editorship of Bagehot, who argued that “The object of The Economist is to throw white light on the subjects within its range”, the paper’s influence grew. One British foreign secretary, Lord Granville, said that whenever he felt uncertain, he liked to wait to see what the next issue of The Economist had to say. A later admirer of Bagehot’s was Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921.

The paper, however, had to wait nearly half a century before getting another remarkable editor. He came in 1922, in the shape of Walter Layton, whose achievement, in the words of The Economist’s historian, Ruth Dudley Edwards*, was to have the paper “read widely in the corridors of power abroad as well as at home”, even if critics said it was “slightly on the dull side of solid”. That was certainly not a criticism that could be levelled at his successor, Geoffrey Crowther, who was probably The Economist’s greatest editor since Bagehot. His contribution was to develop and improve the coverage of foreign affairs, especially American ones, and of business. Its authoritativeness had never been higher.

From the earliest days, The Economist had looked abroad, both for subjects to write about and for circulation. Even in the 1840s, it had readers in Europe and the United States. By 1938, half its sales were abroad although, thanks to world war, not for long. Crowther’s great innovation was to start a section devoted to American affairs, which he did just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. “American Survey” (renamed “United States” in 1997) was aimed not at Americans but at British readers who, Crowther believed, needed to know more about their new allies. In time, however, it earned a following in the United States that became the base for the great rise in American circulation that began in the 1970s.

For most of its existence The Economist has been content with a small circulation. When Bagehot gave up as editor, it stood at 3,700, and by 1920 had climbed to only 6,000. After the second world war, it rose rapidly, but from a base of barely 18,000, and when Crowther left it stood at only 55,000, not reaching 100,000 until 1970. Today circulation is over 1m, more than four-fifths of it outside Britain. The American circulation accounts for over half of the total.

A recent editor, Rupert Pennant-Rea, once described The Economist as “a Friday viewspaper, where the readers, with higher than average incomes, better than average minds but with less than average time, can test their opinions against ours. We try to tell the world about the world, to persuade the expert and reach the amateur, with an injection of opinion and argument.” With readers such as these, and aims such as these, The Economist was bound to find it progressively harder to increase its circulation in Britain. That became especially true in the 1960s and 1970s, when British daily papers started to carry more of the interpretive, argumentative and analytical articles that had traditionally been the preserve of the weeklies. The Economist has survived, and indeed prospered, by building on the internationalism of its outlook and by selling abroad.

In this it has been helped enormously by its coverage of business and economic affairs. Wilson believed that even statistics, so far from being dull, could “afford the deepest and often the most exciting interest.” To this day, readers such as Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, agree. But few readers buy The Economist for one thing alone, and in recent years the paper has added sections devoted to Europe, Asia, Latin America, international issues, and science and technology. It has also expanded coverage of books and arts and introduced a new column on financial markets, Buttonwood.

Articles in The Economist are not signed, but they are not all the work of the editor alone. Initially, the paper was written largely in London, with reports from merchants abroad. Over the years, these gave way to stringers who sent their stories by sea or air mail, and then by telex and cable. Nowadays, in addition to a worldwide network of stringers, the paper has about 20 staff correspondents abroad. Contributors have ranged from Kim Philby, who spied for the Soviet Union, to H.H. Asquith, the paper’s chief leader writer before he became Britain’s prime minister, Garret FitzGerald, who became Ireland’s, and Luigi Einaudi, president of Italy from 1948 to 1955. Even the most illustrious of its staff, however, write anonymously: only special reports, the longish supplements published about 20 times a year on various issues or countries, are signed. In May 2001, a redesign introduced more navigational information for readers and full colour on all editorial pages.

How dumb do you think we are? As dumb as you perhaps?

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I hate it when the editor doesn’t pop up 🙂

So let me add a small portion of your linked article as well:

Our survey is not, by any means, a scientific poll of all economists. We e-mailed a questionnaire to 683 research associates, all we could track down, of the National Bureau of Economic Research, America’s premier association of applied academic economists, though the NBER itself played no role in the survey. A total of 142 responded, of whom 46% identified themselves as Democrats, 10% as Republicans and 44% as neither. This skewed party breakdown may reflect academia’s Democratic tilt, or possibly Democrats’ greater propensity to respond. Still, even if we exclude respondents with a party identification, Mr Obama retains a strong edge—though the McCain campaign should be buoyed by the fact that 530 economists have signed a statement endorsing his plans.

Hmmmmm….

Intersting statistics here – duh

So Doug – Vote for McCain/Palin 🙂

Non-accurate math – can’t account for where the 530 are in the 683 number – but let’s just suppose:

683-
530=153

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Mike, What are you talking about??? I not going to read all that. Just make a point, plain and simple.

Bukersteet, for you:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2008/10/which_candidate_do_economists.cfm

These “530” ballooned from the earlier “300”:

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/PressReleases/Read.aspx?guid=c90681b9-5dfe-4de4-8057-ceedb30c228d

Yet the “300” number has been strongly questioned:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11618.html

The Economist may have been making an attempt at dry humor, then judging, from the first link above, they backtracked and stated more seriously: “Clearly, both sides can muster large numbers of economists and experts in related fields.”

Furthermore, here is a more scientific poll on the numbers of economists that favor Obama more than McCain:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/16/dilbert.economy/

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Doug, OMG…. you’ve got a sense of humor! LOL “scientific poll”…. ROTFLMAO!

You know I think polls are a bunch of BS and hooey. But at least reading the Dilbert poll really made me laugh!

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Doug, give me a break – you won’t find a non-slanted answer for either party on the internet…

COMMON SENSE

Now – I do not agree 100% with either ticket and I have stated that more than a few times

I just do not trust Obama – the same instinct that has kept me alive (more than I care to think about) says “duck”, “cover”, and “run”. Having listened to him since the primaries (and all the other candidates) – I feel like I was drug to an AMWAY meeting.

Personally – If I had GOD powers – I would snap my finger and replace all of congress with Sarah Palin clones 🙂 – joking – but trying to make a point – HONEST people are not always super educated and experts – It may be my ideology – but if we know that there needs to be regulation and oversight on Wall Street – What about regulation and oversight in government? Article I and II of the constitution does not list requirements for office as being smart, educated, experienced, good looking, good talking, etc… (get it?) perhaps our founding fathers actually understood those pitfalls?

Oh yeah – it’s already there – but neither seems to be working well, does it?

Ever wonder why?

It sure isn’t our Constitution.

Well – I have a good idea of why – having watched it for so many years – and OBAMA isn’t going to fix it. I hope that John and Sarah can lead it – the people of this country are the only ones that can force a fix on this – thank you internet and mass communication (you actually might serve some good).

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Nikkei is down 9.55% after 2 hours of trading on recession fears and ripple from Wall Street sell-off today.

http://finance.yahoo.com/

I suspect if Obama becomes POTUS we’ll see much more of this.

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Agreed, on the yeah right, “scientific” poll. You can’t do a “scientific” economic poll that way without it being biased because you tell them right up front whose economic packages they are. Of course they will go along party lines. You are not introducing any controls. The only way to do it at this stage would be to draw them up as seperate proposals (Proposals A, B, and a couple of ficticious ones). You then do not put names on them and have foreign economists review them and all supporting material and base their opinions only on what is presented there. When they finish their review and grade each one, only then do you have them fill out any personal data you want to know like which party they prefer and such. THAT is a scientific poll.

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