Inflation Indexing, Minimum Wage, Taxes

The Ever-Falling Gas Tax | ThinkProgress:

Federal income tax brackets are “indexed” to inflation in order to prevent “bracket creep” by which real taxes would just rise year after year. But the federal gasoline tax is levied in terms of cents on the gallon and is not indexed, meaning that every year we don’t raise the tax the real value falls every year: Pairing a small nominal cut in the gas tax with a provision indexing it to inflation would provide short-term stimulus while improving policy over the long term.

Cynical Thoughts On The Minimum Wage | ThinkProgress: Arindrajit Dube surveys the post-Card/Krueger minimum wageliterature and concludes that their study basically holds up. My general view, with apologies to empirical econometricians doing policy-relevant work everywhere, is that one can generally Google up a study supporting whichever conclusion one prefers.

Consequently, I’ve always thought the most persuasive evidence on this was simply the big picture:

It’s clearly not the case that the high real minimum wage of the 1960s led to unusually elevated unemployment during that decade. And the fact is even more striking when you consider that the real wages of folks in the top quintile were way lower back then.