In general, the NYT options on both the spending-cut and the tax-hike side tend to hit the poor and the middle classes more drastically than the rich; what’s missing here is the option to implement something much more progressive, in both senses of the word. It’s a missed opportunity, and a shame.
The Audit
11:05 PM - November 14, 2010
The NYT’s attempt to fix the budget
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
Fearless British mother who talked down Woolwich terrorists
“It is only you versus many people, you are going to lose”
7 questions for President Obama
Stop with the Jew-ranking already!
“There are some lists that have helped Jews in the past, including, most notably, Schindler’s, but…”
Please continue pronouncing ‘gif’ any way you please
We are all correct
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
The major problem with this tool (which is similar to the California Budget tool
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl,0,95571.htmlstory
) is that it's based on a faulty premise.
It assumes you can fix the deficit with spending cuts and tax increases.
But that assumption only works in a healthy economy that can absorb the spending cuts and taxes. You cannot "fix the deficit" in a recession until you fix falling GDP. You can't fix GDP until you fix unemployment and low consumer confidence. You can't fix unemployment and low consumer confidence until you provide a source of secure jobs.
And secure jobs need money.
So forget the deficit. It's unimportant right now.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_11/026623.php
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 15 Nov 2010 at 04:30 AM
Flash designers fail to grasp a fundamental concept of design: efficient use of space. The constraints that the designer puts on himself will help the user. That thing is far, far, far too big. It's huge.
Flash designers should remember a basic Google concept: Nobody goes to page two.
One solution would be to make the changing graphics and headers (with description summaries on mouse-over?) Flash and decouple it from the descriptions. The descriptions could be below the thing as plain old html.
Another benefit of html is that users can copy and paste the text into a word processing program and play around with it as they like.
Another Flash oddity is that designers make a mess of interactivity. The check-yes-or-no - is far, far too simplistic. Yes/no is so 1980s and so DOS. Why not give a slider with a wide range and let the user decide?
#2 Posted by F. Murray Rumpelstiltskin, CJR on Mon 15 Nov 2010 at 07:39 AM
I had fun playing with the thing, but your critique is right on. Options were too limited. LA Times did a similar thing a few months back here: You balance the budget - latimes.com
It was useful in demonstrating just how preposterous some of the proposals from the right are though, like eliminating earmarks, malpractice "reform" and such nickel-and-dime bumper-sticker idiocy.
#3 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 15 Nov 2010 at 09:06 AM
Say it with me, You Can't Fix The Deficit With Spending Cuts And Tax Increases In A Reccession.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/11/15/ireland-greece-sink-further-into-debt-after-austerity-measures/
The general debate on these economic matters is so predictably dumb. It's not like there aren't any real world examples to draw from.
Ideology driven economics... Big Government Boogeymen...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/the-triumph-of-reagan-over-friedman/
if it weren't for all the starving, desperate people, this would all be a bit funny.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 15 Nov 2010 at 07:54 PM
Ha! Turns out Dave Leonhardt was trolling you guys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html
One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: November 16, 2010
"We look back on the late 1990s as a rare time when the federal government ran budget surpluses. We tend to forget that those surpluses came as a surprise to almost everybody...
What happened? Above all, economic growth. And that may be a big part of the answer to our current problems.
Yes, the government became more fiscally conservative in the 1990s. Both President George H. W. Bush (who doesn’t get enough credit) and President Bill Clinton, working with Congress, raised taxes to attack the 1980s deficits.
But those tax increases were the second most important reason for the surpluses that followed. The most important was the fact that the economy grew more rapidly than expected. The faster growth pushed up incomes and caused more tax revenue to flow into the Treasury.
Today’s looming deficits are almost surely too large to be closed exclusively with growth. The baby boom generation is too big, and the rise in Medicare costs continues to be too steep. Yet growth could still make an enormous difference.
If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades — no easy feat, to be fair — the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.
To get a concrete sense for what this would mean, you can play around with the The Times’s online deficit puzzle. It asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion. That would mean many fewer painful choices, be they tax increases or Medicare cuts.
So arguably the single best way to cut the deficit is to make sure that any deficit-cutting plan does not also cut economic growth. Ideally, it will lift growth...
In the short term, we should actually spend more. “Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt,” argues a new bipartisan deficit plan that will be released Wednesday, the second such plan to come out in the last week. As Alice Rivlin, a Democrat who oversaw the writing of the plan with Pete Domenici, a Republican, put it: “We can do both. We can put money in people’s pockets in the short run and trim government spending in the long run.” .
The plan calls for a one-year payroll tax holiday for employers and workers, costing $650 billion. But remember that’s a one-time sum, while the needed deficit cuts will be hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Relative to those cuts, a payroll tax holiday — or more spending on roads and bridges, as President Obama favors — is a rounding error. And, of course, putting people back to work has its own benefits.
Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn’t simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do. Likewise, it raises tax rates that do not have a clear record of promoting growth and cuts those that do...
In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science.
These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the wo
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 17 Nov 2010 at 06:34 PM
Ha! Turns out Dave Leonhardt was trolling you guys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html
One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: November 16, 2010
"We look back on the late 1990s as a rare time when the federal government ran budget surpluses. We tend to forget that those surpluses came as a surprise to almost everybody...
What happened? Above all, economic growth. And that may be a big part of the answer to our current problems.
Yes, the government became more fiscally conservative in the 1990s. Both President George H. W. Bush (who doesn’t get enough credit) and President Bill Clinton, working with Congress, raised taxes to attack the 1980s deficits.
But those tax increases were the second most important reason for the surpluses that followed. The most important was the fact that the economy grew more rapidly than expected. The faster growth pushed up incomes and caused more tax revenue to flow into the Treasury.
Today’s looming deficits are almost surely too large to be closed exclusively with growth. The baby boom generation is too big, and the rise in Medicare costs continues to be too steep. Yet growth could still make an enormous difference.
If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades — no easy feat, to be fair — the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.
To get a concrete sense for what this would mean, you can play around with the The Times’s online deficit puzzle. It asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion. That would mean many fewer painful choices, be they tax increases or Medicare cuts.
So arguably the single best way to cut the deficit is to make sure that any deficit-cutting plan does not also cut economic growth. Ideally, it will lift growth...
In the short term, we should actually spend more. “Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt,” argues a new bipartisan deficit plan that will be released Wednesday, the second such plan to come out in the last week. As Alice Rivlin, a Democrat who oversaw the writing of the plan with Pete Domenici, a Republican, put it: “We can do both. We can put money in people’s pockets in the short run and trim government spending in the long run.” .
The plan calls for a one-year payroll tax holiday for employers and workers, costing $650 billion. But remember that’s a one-time sum, while the needed deficit cuts will be hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Relative to those cuts, a payroll tax holiday — or more spending on roads and bridges, as President Obama favors — is a rounding error. And, of course, putting people back to work has its own benefits.
Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn’t simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do. Likewise, it raises tax rates that do not have a clear record of promoting growth and cuts those that do...
In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science.
These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the wo
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 17 Nov 2010 at 06:34 PM
Ha! Turns out Dave Leonhardt was trolling you guys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html
One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: November 16, 2010
"We look back on the late 1990s as a rare time when the federal government ran budget surpluses. We tend to forget that those surpluses came as a surprise to almost everybody...
What happened? Above all, economic growth. And that may be a big part of the answer to our current problems.
Yes, the government became more fiscally conservative in the 1990s. Both President George H. W. Bush (who doesn’t get enough credit) and President Bill Clinton, working with Congress, raised taxes to attack the 1980s deficits.
But those tax increases were the second most important reason for the surpluses that followed. The most important was the fact that the economy grew more rapidly than expected. The faster growth pushed up incomes and caused more tax revenue to flow into the Treasury.
Today’s looming deficits are almost surely too large to be closed exclusively with growth. The baby boom generation is too big, and the rise in Medicare costs continues to be too steep. Yet growth could still make an enormous difference.
If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades — no easy feat, to be fair — the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.
To get a concrete sense for what this would mean, you can play around with the The Times’s online deficit puzzle. It asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion. That would mean many fewer painful choices, be they tax increases or Medicare cuts.
So arguably the single best way to cut the deficit is to make sure that any deficit-cutting plan does not also cut economic growth. Ideally, it will lift growth...
In the short term, we should actually spend more. “Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt,” argues a new bipartisan deficit plan that will be released Wednesday, the second such plan to come out in the last week. As Alice Rivlin, a Democrat who oversaw the writing of the plan with Pete Domenici, a Republican, put it: “We can do both. We can put money in people’s pockets in the short run and trim government spending in the long run.” .
The plan calls for a one-year payroll tax holiday for employers and workers, costing $650 billion. But remember that’s a one-time sum, while the needed deficit cuts will be hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Relative to those cuts, a payroll tax holiday — or more spending on roads and bridges, as President Obama favors — is a rounding error. And, of course, putting people back to work has its own benefits.
Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn’t simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do. Likewise, it raises tax rates that do not have a clear record of promoting growth and cuts those that do...
In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science.
These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the wo
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 17 Nov 2010 at 06:55 PM