Outside the Beltway

Pseudo-Progressivity

· Tuesday, May 3, 2005 · No comments

Matthew Yglesias claims that Krugman picks apart the “pseudo-progressivity” of the Bush Social Security plan. It is at moments like this that I have to wonder what in the heck he’s got in his liqour cabinet because it must be good stuff and I want some. Seriously the cuts of the Bush plan are progressive: The more you make the more your benefits are cut. For Krugman to get this whacky notion that the cuts are progressive he has to use a calculation where the reduction is as a percentage of pre-retirment income. Any cuts at all to benefits are going to have a hard time being progressive with this bizzare definition. Recall that these types of cuts are quite similar to the ones proposed by such esteemed liberals as Diamond and Orzsag.

Via Just One Minute.

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Steve Verdon
About Steve Verdon
Steve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research. He joined the staff at OTB in November 2004.

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