An intresting yin to the professor’s yang on the Bush Tax Cuts:
Russ Wiles:

Prescott, speaking from Minnesota, where he advises the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, described Kerry’s plan to roll back tax cuts for top wage-earners as counterproductive.
“The idea that you can increase taxes and stimulate the economy is pretty damn stupid,” he said.
Bush’s campaign on Monday released a letter signed by Prescott and five other Nobel laureates critical of Kerry’s proposal to roll back tax reductions for families earning $200,000 or more.
In The Republic interview, he said such a policy would discourage people from working.
“It’s easy to get over $200,000 in income with two wage earners in a household,” Prescott said. “We want those highly educated, talented people to work.”
Prescott also gave Bush the nod on another controversial campaign issue, dismissing Kerry’s claims that outsourcing of jobs is damaging the economy. . . . Prescott also backed the idea, espoused by Bush, to reform Social Security by allowing some workers to place a portion of their payroll taxes into private savings accounts.

Personally, I’d rather see a more straightforward approach to taxes, than the ongoing deals with special interest groups that Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported recently. via instapundit

As always, the rest of us get to pay. Evidently our senators, Russ Feingold (Yes) and Herb Kohl (“Present”) support these very narrow non populist measures. Edmund Andrews:

Under the bill, Navy shipbuilders would be allowed to once again defer paying most federal income taxes on a project until the contract was completed. Because it takes about five years to build an aircraft carrier and three years to build a destroyer, the shipyards would be able to delay their tax bills for years, allowing more opportunity to offset taxes against future losses.
….
“This provision takes dramatic steps to remedy the inequity of how naval shipbuilders pay their taxes,” Ms. Snowe said in a statement last week, just after House and Senate negotiators agreed to include the provision in a broader bill that would shower $140 billion in tax cuts across almost every segment of industry.
But critics said the provision would not create jobs, the stated intention of the tax bill, because employment at naval shipyards is determined almost entirely by federal spending on ships and submarines rather than by tax incentives.
“We’re not going to buy any more war boats if we give them a tax incentive,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research group here that has long scrutinized corporate tax practices. “We’re going to buy more boats if the government decides we need more boats.”