Contributor

Gary Burtless, Chair in Economic Studies, Brookings Institution

Biography provided by participant

Gary Burtless holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He is also a research associate of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research focuses on issues connected with public finance, aging, saving, labor markets, income distribution, social insurance, and the behavioral effects of government tax and transfer policy. Burtless graduated from Yale College in 1972 and received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. Before coming to Brookings in 1981, he served as an economist in the policy and evaluation offices of the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. In 1993 he was Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has served as a consultant on pension reform to the World Bank, as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Labor on evaluation policy and social experiments, on technical advisory panels charged with analyzing the status and reform of U.S. Social Security, and as a panel member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Health and Safety Needs of Older Workers.

Recent Responses

October 12, 2010 05:16 PM

RE: Any Silver Linings In Jobs Report?

Private job gains and public job losses Americans had little reason to find cheer in last week’s jobs report. Unless they expected to see clear signs of a recession, readers of the report must have been disappointed by the actual performance and near-term prospects of the job market. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at a high level, and the number of payroll jobs fell 95,000. There were three moderately reassuring pieces of news. The recovery in private sector employment continued for the ninth consecutive month. So far this year private firms have added an average of 96,000 jobs every month. The pace of private job creation… Read more

May 10, 2010 03:04 PM

RE: The Long-Term Jobless

The Problems of the Long-term Unemployed The number of long-term unemployed reached an all-time peak in April, both absolutely and as a percentage of the nation’s unemployed. According to the most recent BLS employment report, 6.7 million Americans have been jobless for at least 6 months. Longtime job seekers now represent 46% of the unemployed, an astonishingly high percentage. To put this number in perspective, in previous recessions the peak fraction of unemployed who have been unemployed longer than 6 months is rarely more than one-quarter of the unemployed. In the worst post-war recession, which occurred in President Reagan’s first term, the percentage… Read more

May 3, 2010 03:17 PM

RE: Not To Be Believed

Users Still Looking for a Better Option Credit rating agencies originally gained credibility with investors by providing disinterested expertise in assessing the creditworthiness of corporate borrowers. Because they specialized in evaluating the risk of hundreds of corporate bonds, the rating agencies could bring more information to bear than most nonspecialist investors in determining the odds that a particular bond issue would default. What is more, the rating agencies expressed the likelihood of default using a consistent standard and one that was easy for investors to grasp. This kind of expertise and product standardization has obvious value, especially to institutional investors who must provide… Read more

April 26, 2010 04:15 PM

RE: VAT Or Not?

If Big Revenues Are Needed, so Is a VAT For many years sober budget analysts and economists have been warning of the rising future cost of government health and retirement programs. The increase in expected federal outlays is the result of two predictable developments: The rise in the proportion of the population that is past age 65 and the apparently irrepressible surge in the price and quantity of medical services consumed by people who are covered by public insurance (medicaid and Medicare). The aging of the population will increase spending requirements for social security, Medicare, medicaid, and all other public programs from which the elderly receive an… Read more

April 19, 2010 10:00 AM

RE: Who Decides When The Recession Ends?

The NBER Should Decide The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is widely recognized as the arbiter of starting and ending dates of U.S. recessions. In its website page listing recessions and expansions back through the 1850s, the NBER defines a recession as “…a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” A sizeable majority of the Bureau’s Business Cycle Dating Committee is not yet confident the recession that began at the end of 2007 has ended. I… Read more

March 30, 2010 10:54 AM

RE: Are Tax Buyouts A Good Idea?

An Excellent Idea … for a Theory Journal Marco Del Negro, Fabrizio Perri, and Fabiano Schivardi propose an ingenious way to reduce the deadweight loss of the income tax. In essence, their idea is to permit taxpayers to reduce their marginal income tax rates in exchange for paying the IRS a fixed amount of money. In exchange for lowering their marginal tax rates by 5%, for example, the IRS might offer taxpayers the option of paying $4,500 at the beginning of a tax year. Income taxes impose three kinds of losses on taxpayers. First, citizens must pay the income tax required by the… Read more

March 15, 2010 10:22 AM

RE: The Savings Rebound That Hasn't Happened

Saving Rate Still Well above Decade Lows The latest personal income statistics show a dip in the household saving rate below the rate of the previous 14 months. It's easy to exaggerate the significance of this drop, however. The personal saving rate is both volatile and sensitive to measurement error. Revisions in consumption and income data can produce big swings in our estimates of the saving rate. Even with January's dip the estimated saving rate remains higher than it was in any month in the three years before the onset of the 2007-2008 recession. The average personal saving rate over the 12 months… Read more

March 1, 2010 11:19 AM

RE: Barro On Stimulus

Stimulus works better than Barro thinks Unlike many other critics of the 2009 stimulus package, Robert Barro does not argue that national output is unchanged or lower as a result of the stimulus. In fact, he acknowledges that in the short run the stimulus package has boosted GDP and will do so for the next couple of years. He argues, however, that GDP will be sharply lower in 2012 and 2013 as a result of the stimulus package. He therefore concludes that over the five years between 2009 to 2013 GDP will be lower with the stimulus than it would have been… Read more

February 22, 2010 11:05 AM

RE: Will China Keep Buying American?

Benefits of a stronger Chinese currency Between December 2008 and December 2009 the amount of U.S. Treasury debt held by the public, including investors in other countries, increased about $1.44 trillion. According to the Treasury Department, a little less than 2% of the additional debt was purchased by mainland China. Even if we add in the purchases of Hong Kong investors, China's net purchases of Treasury debt amounted to only a bit more than 7% of the new debt issued by the U.S. government. The most important net purchasers of Treasury debt were Americans (63% of the total), the United Kingdom and its… Read more

February 11, 2010 06:27 PM

RE: A Few Questions On Freezing Tax Expenditures

Trim Tax Expenditures ... Prudently Len Burman, one of the nation’s leading experts on the tax system, proposes to freeze federal tax expenditures. His freeze would be a companion to the one proposed by President Obama in his most recent budget. Like the President’s freeze on domestic discretionary spending, Burman’s freeze would not begin immediately but would be implemented in the not-too-distant future. Burman, like the President, would not impose his freeze in a mechanical, inflexible way. Under Burman’s plan Congress would be obliged to trim some tax expenditures and eliminate others in order to maintain an overall cap on tax expenditures. An ideal freeze… Read more

December 14, 2009 10:33 AM

RE: When To Tighten Fiscal Policy?

The Administration and Congress can take prudent short-term measures to deal with the recession and simultaneously take steps to deal with the nation’s long-term budget problem. In the near term the government must boost spending or reduce taxes in order to spur faster economic growth and deal with the fallout from a severe recession. Large-scale fiscal stimulus would be unnecessary if the Federal Reserve still had scope to reduce short-term interest rates, but it does not. Short-term rates have been kept close to zero for the past year, giving the Fed little additional scope for using traditional monetary policy to encourage faster growth. Under… Read more

December 7, 2009 07:50 AM

RE: Is The Jobs Outlook Improving?

In a very gloomy year for America’s job market, the November employment report is the best one we’ve seen in a long time. The big news is that the unemployment rate is down. Even though the drop is small, this is only the second month we have seen a drop in unemployment in the past year and a half. In addition, the number of payroll jobs is essentially flat. This sounds bad, but it is a huge improvement over the situation a year ago when payrolls were tumbling more than 600,000 every month. Both the employer survey and the household… Read more

November 9, 2009 12:19 PM

RE: Creating Or 'Saving' More Jobs

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Data” is the plural of “anecdote.” Most of us are much more comfortable with anecdotes than we are with careful data analysis. It is therefore perfectly understandable when newspapers and television feature anecdotes rather than statistical analysis to describe the state or trend of the economy. Unfortunately, almost every anecdote is open to competing interpretations. This was obvious at the end of October when the… Read more