Tax-Based Incomes Policies

macroeconomics, income policy, income, taxes

The New Classical Counter-Revolution: A False Path for Macroeconomics

This article contends that the "new" classical counter-revolution that began in the 1970s has been a false path for macroeconomics. Keynesian economics nicely explained the 1970s stagflation that followed the world oil price hike with a shift up of the supply curve in its AD/AS diagram. Lucas and Sargent ignored oil, could not explain the 1970s stagflation, and committed the fatal mistake of assuming instantaneous labor-market clearing. Barro assumed without empirical evidence that consumers entirely save any tax cut because they want to be ready to pay higher future taxes. Prescott's fatal mistake with real business cycles was the same as Lucas' and Sargent's. New classical economics has been characterized by mathematical manipulation of models fatally flawed by empirically unrealistic assumptions.Macroeconomics; New Classical; Prices; Supply

Reply to: ‘The New Classical Counter-Revolution: False Path or Illuminating Complement?’

The picture of economic well-being depends crucially on how it is measured. We introduce a new measure of economic well-being that includes public consumption, income from wealth, and household production. The differences in scope and method between our measure and standard income lead to substantially different findings regarding economic well-being. The average U.S. household appears to be much better off in 2001 relative to 1989 according to our measure in comparison to money income. In contrast to official measures, our measure shows that racial disparity increased. The increase in measured inequality was higher than indicated by the official measures.

Toxicology of atmospheric degradation products of selected hydrochlorofluorocarbons

Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) is a liquid with a sharp biting odor. It has been proposed as the product of environmental degradation of the hydrochlorofluorocarbons HCFC-123, HCFC-124, HFC-134a, and HFC-125. Compounds HCFC-141b and HCFC-142b could yield mixed fluorochloroacetic acids, for which there is no available toxicologic data. The release of hydrochlorofluorocarbons into the environment could also give rise to HF, but the additional fluoride burden (1 to 3 ppb) in rainwater is trivial compared to levels in fluoridated drinking water (1 ppm), and would provide an insignificant risk to humans. Thus, in this paper only the toxocologic data on TFA is reviewed to assess the potential risks of environmental exposure

Energy Efficient Relay-Assisted Cellular Network Model using Base Station Switching

Cellular network planning strategies have tended to focus on peak traffic scenarios rather than energy efficiency. By exploiting the dynamic nature of traffic load profiles, the prospect for greener communications in cellular access networks is evolving. For example, powering down base stations (BS) and applying cell zooming can significantly reduce energy consumption, with the overriding design priority still being to uphold a minimum quality of service (QoS). Switching off cells completely can lead to both coverage holes and performance degradation in terms of increased outage probability, greater transmit power dissipation in the up and downlinks, and complex interference management, even at low traffic loads. In this paper, a cellular network model is presented where certain BS rather than being turned off, are switched to low-powered relay stations (RS) during zero-to-medium traffic periods. Neighbouring BS still retain all the baseband signal processing and transmit signals to corresponding RS via backhaul connections, under the assumption that the RS covers the whole cell. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of this new BS-RS Switching technique from both an energy saving and QoS perspective, in the up and downlinks

Analysis of fuzzy clustering and a generic fuzzy rule-based image segmentation technique

Many fuzzy clustering based techniques when applied to image segmentation do not incorporate spatial relationships of the pixels, while fuzzy rule-based image segmentation techniques are generally application dependent. Also for most of these techniques, the structure of the membership functions is predefined and parameters have to either automatically or manually derived. This paper addresses some of these issues by introducing a new generic fuzzy rule based image segmentation (GFRIS) technique, which is both application independent and can incorporate the spatial relationships of the pixels as well. A qualitative comparison is presented between the segmentation results obtained using this method and the popular fuzzy c-means (FCM) and possibilistic c-means (PCM) algorithms using an empirical discrepancy method. The results demonstrate this approach exhibits significant improvements over these popular fuzzy clustering algorithms for a wide range of differing image types