Fiscal foresight - the phenomenon that legislative and implementation lags ensure that private agents receive clear signals about the tax rates they face in the future - is intrinsic to the tax policy process. This paper develops an analytical framework to study the econometric implications of...

Monetary policy decisions tend to be based on systematic analysis of alternative policy choices and their associated macroeconomic impacts: this is science. Fiscal policy choices, in contrast, spring from unsystematic speculation, grounded more in politics than economics: this is alchemy. In...