Is that the same Art Laffer who says that he voted for Clinton and Obama? I thought so. People seem to think he is a Reagan conservative despite his own admissions to the contrary.
” because most economists believe the USA’s federal tax rates are on the right side of the laffer curve inflection point”
Much as I like Trump and despise BOR you aren’t going to find any economists saying anything like that because they don’t use the ‘Laffer Curve’. No one does because it’s just a teaching device and not a real tool. No one has plotted out a ‘Laffer Curve’ and attached numbers to it, not even publicity hound Art himself. All you ever see is a nice regular parabola.
And there is a great deal of misunderstanding about tax cuts like Reagan’s. No one in Reagan’s team predicted more tax revenue would result from his tax cuts. What they said was that growth would recoup about 2/3 of the revenue loss predicted by using static analysis and that’s what actually happened. If you recall they had requested spending cuts from Tip O’Neill that they didn’t get. The budget deficit increased and Reagan later had to raise taxes to address it.
Moreover the Reagan tax rates were set to promote optimum private sector economic growth and not optimum tax revenues. The two optimum rates are not the same. The government will get higher tax receipts at a higher tax rate, but the private sector will stagnate. At a lower rate the economy can grow but tax receipts are lower. The sole instance where this didn’t prove to be true under the Reagan cuts was in regard to capital gains taxes, and ironically those cuts were made by Jimmy Carter.
That is factually incorrect. Revenues increased throughout the 80's. Just like they did in the 60's following Kennedy's tax cuts.
Revenue:
FY 1988 - $909 billion. FY 1987 - $854 billion. FY 1986 - $769 billion. FY 1985 - $734 billion. FY 1984 - $666 billion. FY 1983 - $601 billion. FY 1982 - $618 billion. FY 1981 - $599 billion.Current U.S. Federal Government Tax Revenue
At a lower rate the economy can grow but tax receipts are lower.
Simply not true. In the future please do research before posting on one of my threads. If you make declarative statements please back it up with facts and not hot air.
Thanks central_va.