Word: feldstein
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...budget meeting to insisting that the third stage of his income tax cuts, a 10% reduction taking effect July 1, could not be trimmed or delayed, and talked about moving it up to Jan. 1 in order to stimulate the economy. The idea horrified not only his economists (Martin Feldstein, his chief economic adviser, calculated it would add $14 billion to the fiscal 1983 deficit) but his political aides, who knew that it would be next to impossible to sell to Congress. Nonetheless, Reagan clung to the idea for almost a month. He finally abandoned it last week after Republican...
...news was for the short-run outlook, it was almost matched for bleakness by long-run prognostications made last week by the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. A somber Martin Feldstein told a breakfast gathering of reporters at the Washington Press Club that the unemployment rate may take five or six years to drop to the 6% to 7% level that prevailed during the early months...
Trying to downplay the White House's responsibility for such a dismal prospect, Feldstein and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan have argued repeatedly in recent weeks that the U.S. is plagued by a high rate of "structural unemployment," which cannot be cured by the Government's traditional pump-priming tactics of boosting spending or expanding the money supply. The term structural unemployment is a fuzzy concept that has been bandied about by economists for years, but has no clear-cut definition. Generally speaking, it refers to people out of work not as a result of a recession, but because...
...everybody was convinced, however, that the tax would really generate a net gain in jobs. Feldstein predicted the plan would end up siphoning off jobs from energy-related sectors. Some on Capitol Hill complained that the proposal was not aimed at areas hardest hit by high unemployment. Said Wyoming Republican Congressman Dick Cheney: "You can make a case that the roads and bridges need work. But I don't believe that it will add jobs...
...rationale for an unemployment benefits tax, as explained by Martin S. Feldstein '61, the President's choice to chair the Council of Economic Advisors, is that it would, in other words, make unemployment even less appealing relative to holding a job. That argument, however, rests on a shaky hypothesis. It assumes that 10.4 percent of Americans without jobs have willfilly shunned work because their unemployment benefits of up to $12,000 a year were too cushy an alternative...