Word: okun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...favors a temporary tax cut of undetermined size to stimulate the economy and help reduce unemployment. Unlike the present head of the CEA. Alan Greenspan, Schultze thinks it is socially disastrous to combat inflation by keeping the lid on the economy and keeping unemployment high, says fellow Economist Arthur Okun. On the other hand, Schultze, no doctrinaire, fully appreciates the dangers of inflation. It was largely his testimony that brought about the drastic revision of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, which would attack unemployment by making the Government the employer of last resort and which he considered inflationary in its original...
...agree almost unanimously that even this tepid performance will not be achieved unless the new Administration pumps more money into the sagging economy. Walter Heller, one of three members of the Board of Economists who have attended long meetings with Carter since the election−the others are Arthur Okun and Joseph Pechman− predicts a 4.5% rise in real gross national product next year, but only with sizable stimulation of the economy by Washington. Without it, he says, the increase might be as little as 3.5%. Republican Murray Weidenbaum of Washington University in St. Louis has come around...
...liberals, the greatest allure of rebates is that they would put money immediately into the pockets of consumers but would not shrink federal revenues over the long run and cut into plans for social programs, as they believe a permanent tax cut would do. Okun, a senior fellow at Washington's Brookings Institution and once chief economic adviser to Lyndon Johnson, feels that a permanent cut would "paint Carter into a corner" before he has a chance to move on such other fronts as welfare reform and health insurance...
What caused the spending shortfall is still largely a mystery. Nathan 'theorizes that Ford Administration bureaucrats responded altogether too strongly to White House pressure to hold down the budget. Okun believes that departments and agencies estimated their spending at the highest levels foreseeable−which in fact were not met−to avoid any chance of having to apologize to the boss for overrunning their targets. There were also some mechanical delays in handing out federal contracts. For a while, some economists believed that the money not spent in 1976 would flow out in 1977, lessening the need...
Carter has ruled out formal wage-price controls and his advisers seem opposed even to voluntary guidelines that would set numerical standards. What kind of wage-price policy does that leave? Okun suggests a series of "prayer meetings" at which Administration officials will urge business and labor leaders in general terms to make sacrifices for the sake of noninflationary growth. He also forecasts a highly informal "prenotification" standard−a request that businessmen and labor leaders inform the new President privately of planned wage and price hikes and discuss their justification in advance. Pechman, director of economic studies at Brookings...