Josh Barro, Columnist

The Wall Street Journal's Bad Plan for Greece

January 14, 2013 at 9:46 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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The Wall Street Journal ran a staff editorial in today's newspaper urging Greece to adopt a flat tax as a road out of its economic troubles. This is a demonstration of the first rule of the Journal's editorial writing: Whatever your problem is, it can be fixed with a flat tax.

Greece has lots of public policy failures available to criticize, including unsustainable public benefits and an apparent inability to enforce its tax laws. Most problematically, Greece gave up control over its currency and therefore can't devalue when it desperately needs to.