Monday round up: Benko suggests the Fed is keeping unemployment high; Kessler says Obamacare penalizes work; Mitchell on the GOP tax debate.

At Forbes, Ralph Benko suggests Fed policy is keeping unemployment high (with a kind mention of this blog).

From The WSJ, Stanford’s Daniel Kessler explains that Obamacare imposes substantial penalties on working.

Cato’s Dan Mitchell sides with Grover Norquist against Sen. Tom Coburn (OK) on the need to cut taxes commensurate with eliminating tax expenditures.

On The Kudlow Report, Vince Reinhart discusses QE2’s end:




The NY Sun explains to the President that his weak dollar, not speculators, is behind high oil prices.

At International Liberty, Dan Mitchell expresses cautious optimism at the President’s proposed corporate tax rate reduction.

From Mercatus, Veronique de Rugy and Jason Fichtner report federal income taxes paid by quintile:

At The American Thinker, Chuck Roger rebuts Donald Trump’s protectionist rhetoric.

On Forbes, Brink Lindsey argues for innovation and growth.

From The NYT, David Stockman shows no appreciation for pro-growth economics, advocating painful tax increases on the middle class and wealthy, increased capital gains taxes, and means testing entitlements. On the plus side, he does favor a sound dollar:

The culprit here was the combination of ultralow rates of interest at the Federal Reserve and ultralow rates of taxation on capital gains. The former destroyed the nation’s capital markets, fueling huge growth in household and business debt, serial asset bubbles and endless leveraged speculation in equities, commodities, currencies and other assets.

At the same time, the nearly untaxed windfall gains accrued to pure financial speculators, not the backyard inventors envisioned by the Republican-inspired capital-gains tax revolution of 1978. And they happened in an environment of essentially zero inflation, the opposite of the double-digit inflation that justified a lower tax rate on capital gains back then — but which is now simply an obsolete tax subsidy to the rich.

Also in The Times, Paul Krugman wants tax increases.