What happens when property owners stop paying their taxes? On January 8, 2012 the Detroit Free Press examined the property tax problem in Michigan (“Unpaid taxes put thousands of metro homeowners at risk of foreclosure”). This story reminds us that cities and counties are losing tax revenue not just as property values fall, but as people struggle…
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Fiscal policing in Europe
The Times editorializes about the austerity plan adopted at the E.U. summit: The fiscal pact imposes substantial fines on any signatory nation whose deficit averages more than 0.5 percent of gross domestic product over a full economic cycle, a condition the United States would have had great trouble meeting over the past three decades. The summiteers…
Austerity overseas
Quick repost on austerity, again, from the New York Times. Austerity has been a hot topic as papers cover the E.U. Summit, which started yesterday in Brussels. The summit will presumably finalize the terms of a deficit treaty and rescue fund for troubled European economies. While austerity seems to have lost little of its political…
Delegating Economic Policy to the Technocrats, and Away from Democracy (NYTimes.com)
The discourse of austerity often invokes the specter of the technocrat: fiscal crisis has often paved the way for “emergency” takeovers of urban governments, with lasting consequences for both cities and democracy. In Michigan, fiscal crisis may be used to legitimate the dissolution of Detroit’s elected government (on the heels of Flint and the Detroit…
Austerity in Britain: not working?
Brad DeLong, blogger and economics professor at UC Berkeley, discusses the recent economic news from Brtain, home of (and the “Big Society”). By contrast, the Cameron-Osborne policies of expansion-through-austerity have produced a flatline for real GDP, and the odds are high that British real GDP is headed down again. In less than a year, if…