Liberal Oasis interview with Paul Krugman

[flpoljunkie]

Well worth reading in its entirety...

http://www.liberaloasis.com/krugman.htm

An excerpt re repeal of middle class tax cuts:

LO: There seems to be a fault line forming in the Democratic primary, with one side Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt wanting to repeal all the Bush tax cuts, and on the other John Kerry, John Edwards and Joe Lieberman saying we should at least keep the tax cuts for the middle-class.

Is one of those strategies better than another for the economy?

PK: Put it this way. If you do the arithmetic, take the estimates of where we are on budget, we’re actually very deep in the hole.

The best estimates say we got a fundamental shortfall of about 4.5 or 4.6 percent of GDP. The Bush tax cuts are actually about 2.7 percent of GDP.

So the truth is, even if we rolled them all back, we would still have a hole in the budget.

If you wanted to…keep the tax cuts for the middle-class, there’s something to be said for it. Our tax system has gotten a lot less progressive over the past 20 years.

But that means that you’re going to have to come up either with some kind of program cuts or some kind of additional revenue elsewhere.

Even with all the Bush tax cuts rolled back, we still have a long-run budget problem, though it’s not nearly as severe as the one we’re right now facing.

So if somebody says, “I just want to repeal some parts of it,” I think it’s fair to ask, “Well OK, what else are you going to do?”

[ixion]

1. It’s not a handful of voices in the wilderness

nope... our voice is growing. Just hope it grows loud enough before the '04 election.

[maha]

2. Read this! n/t