Posted: April 10th, 2015

You are the chief economic advisor to one of the presidential candidates

You are the chief economic advisor to one of the presidential candidates—whether Republican or Democratic or some other party is your choice. The question of raising taxes on high-income earners keeps coming up in debates and town halls. Should your candidate defend or oppose raising taxes? What economic concept supports the stance your candidate takes on the question?
Please write a 500-word editorial for him or her, something that your candidate can publish in leading newspapers around the country. (In newspaper parlance, such a piece is called an op-ed, meaning “opposite the editorial page.”) Remember: although the candidate is a politician, you are an economist. You are writing in your candidate’s name (“As a candidate for the highest office in the land, I believe that taxes are a necessary evil”), and you want your candidate to sound as if he or she knows something about economics without appearing to be so academic that the audience will tune out.
You may wish to use Jonathan Chait’s op-ed “Captives of the Supply Side”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09chait.html?ref=opinion as background, making your editorial either a rebuttal or an endorsement of Chait’s argument. As before, however, please cite some recent article from the Wall Street Journal to give specific weight to your argument. You will certainly want to study the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times to get a feel for how op-ed pieces are structured.