https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/02/black-property-tax/ To expose the structural and historical factors behind these discriminatory property tax assessments, the economists analyzed more than a decade of tax assessment and sales data for 118 million homes throughout the country. In almost every state, property tax assessments were higher in areas with more black and Hispanic residents. In city after city, […]
Category Archives: Government
Seattle Police and Deadly Force
“To her point, a Seattle Times investigation in 2015 found that of 213 people killed by police in Washington state from 2005 to 2014, only one officer was criminally charged with illegal use of deadly force; he was later acquitted. In fact it was the only prosecution in at least 30 years. The investigation found […]
“It could have been my son”
When asked why they had come, most people spoke about the need for police accountability, before inevitably turning to remembering Floyd’s unheeded final pleas. “It could have been my son. It could have been me. It shouldn’t be,” said a protester carrying a sign saying “Lock them up”. Hundreds demand justice in Minneapolis after police […]
Tax Cuts and Labor Supply Elasticity
Dietrich E. Vollrath on why tax cuts don’t lead to growth: We think that if you lower the tax rate, and hence raise the returns to inputs, we should get more of them. But to “supercharge” growth in GDP, or to have any appreciable effect on GDP at all, you need that the elasticity of […]
Federal Deficits and Government Spending
Stephanie Kelton with an NYT editorial on why the deficit doesn’t matter, but the economy does: The trick is to adjust the budget to make efficient use of the people, factories and raw materials we have…. But all of this goes unrecognized on Capitol Hill, where the very words “debt” and “deficit” have been weaponized […]
Partisan Gerrymandering Case before the Supreme Court
NPR: “Partisan Gerrymandering– How Much is Too Much?“ With the court apparently split 4-4 along liberal-conservative lines, the man in the middle is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in a 2004 court opinion left the door open to declaring extreme partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional if “manageable standards” could be developed for identifying which ones are extreme. Justice […]
Implementations on Antitrust
Matt Yglesias, 5 different things people mean when they say we need to revive anti-trust: Democrats are both united in their newfound interest in antitrust measures and also divided on exactly what a reinvigoration entails. That’s in part because at least five different ideas are floating around that often get mushed together under the same […]
Labor Law Reform and Employment
Good reads: William E Forbath and Brishen Rogers with an op-ed in the New York Times on labor law reform to help modern workers. Tim Duy at Bloomberg with a warning against reliance on interest rate forecasts for the Federal Reserve.
Unemployment Rates for Black Residents in Washington DC
Linnea Lassiter at DCFPI wrote a paper on the growing unemployment rates for Black D.C. residents, and the Washington City Paper has done a recap. One hypothesis is that the culprit is a booming D.C. economy that has drawn an influx of jobs and labor that typically go to white, college-educated applicants, combined with the […]
Words with Ha Joon Chang
Trust Me, I’m an Economist