Taxing Issues

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While the politically correct Left has been espousing a regressive establishment ideology during the last quarter century, there is some creative movement within the remnants of the realitic Left.

Like the Catholic Church, that does not seem to have much confidence left in its core theology, the Left has largely been hiding behind "green" ideological leadership, leaving its original clientele — the low-income working population — in the lurch.

I hope increasingly people will begin to matter again, instead of the fetish notions of salaried workers belonging to an economically secure generation who consider it "cool" to think themselves progressive ("J.F. Kennedy put a man on the moon, Obama put a man in the lady's room").

Writes Lord Keynes:

Certainly raising taxes in the midst of a depression, recession or period of weak aggregate demand and large-scale unemployment is a bad idea. But it is fascinating indeed to hear L. Randall Wray give the left heterodox case for lowering corporate taxes and payroll taxes. If I am not mistaken, some of these ideas on taxes discussed here are derived from the thinking of Hyman Minsky.

While this is not quite an endorsement of Trump’s tax policies, there is at least a left heterodox case for tax cuts and a reformed tax system, which shifts the burden of taxes to certain types of income tax, property tax, financial transactions, banks, and other anti-social behaviour. Cuts to corporate taxes, if properly done, could be part of broader industrial policy to shift manufacturing back to the United States, and to other Western nations.

The Source. 

As against this, here is a more sanguine view of how easy it is to get the economy going if only the "oppressed" are relieved.