Michael Tomasky sounds like an economics moron.
No economist ever espoused anything called “trickle down economics.” The point about taxes is that they affect the incentives people have to invest their wealth. High taxes encourage the wealthy to protect their wealth in havens, or buy tax-free bonds; they discourage the wealthy from investing in productive enterprises that have higher risk but which also create jobs in the process of earning them a return.
Additionally, if you’ve read about “Hauser’s Law”, you’ll note that irrespective of how high tax rates are, government always gets about 20% of GDP. Tax rates don’t affect how much revenue goes to government, but they do affect the size of GDP: lower tax rates correlate to higher GDP; higher tax rates with lower GDP. Therefore, by raising tax rates, government actually gets less revenue because it’s getting 20% of a smaller economic pie.
A few months ago, Thomas Sowell wrote an interesting essay on the myth of “trickle down economics”, which you can access here:
http://www.tsowell.com/images/Hoover%20Proof.pdf
Remember, progressives never get the concept of incentives or marginal rates. They view all reductions in tax rates as government’s “giving” people money. And who deserves less to be “given” money than “the rich”?
Well said. The moron author of the article, by describing Reaganomics as “government investing in the rich” is doing more harm than Romney...