Good pictures from my ski trip to Seattle, yes Seattle. They'll be up soon. In the meantime, here's a good post re: the Deficit Commission from Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw:
"Here is a question I have been pondering. If you were a member of the fiscal commission, what would you try to achieve?
The answer for liberals is easy: They want to raise taxes to fund the existing, and even an expanded, social safety net, while politically insulating the Democrats as much as possible from the charge of being the "tax and spend" party. President Obama can then campaign in 2012 that he did not break his no-taxes-on-the-middle-class pledge, but rather a bipartisan group broke it. That is, the President wants to take credit for fixing the fiscal situation but duck responsibility for having imposed higher taxes...
A reasonable position is, perhaps, that the commission should not succeed. After all, it is the president's responsibility to put out a budget. The one he just released is, as I argued in my recent Times column, not a sustainable one at all. He just passed the buck to the fiscal commission. Perhaps conservatives should not allow him to do that but, instead, should try to force him to put out a sustainable budget on his own. After all, isn't that Peter Orszag's job?"
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