Posted on 11/27/2005 10:56:24 AM PST by SmithL
I like the author-Ms. Lochead. She's hot stuff.
Carolyn Lochhead has been the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington corresondent since 1991. Prior to the Chronicle, she wrote for Insight Magazine, as well as newspapers in California and Louisiana. Lochhead holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
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The evidence is that tax cuts cause revenues to be less than they would be otherwise, just as one would expect. See the analysis at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/taxcuts.html.
Your 2 articles do appear to muddy the waters of the argument I mentioned. However, I'm not particularly convinced that they support your point very well either.
After all, it seems self evident that there would be a point of no return, a tax level that would yield peak revenues, beyond which the drag on the economy would cause a decrease. Not that I begin to think there is any justification for a government extracting any kind of peak revenues from its subjects.
Would you do me a favor and describe exactly where you are coming from? I read some of your back posts, most seem to favor high taxation and top down direction of the economy. However, I'm not really ready to assume that those are the things you support.
The main place that I am "coming from" is the gathering and analysis of budget and economic data from credible sources. When I became interested in this over a decade ago, I was amazed at how much bad data was being cited in public political discussion. If you look through my web site at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/budget.html, you'll see that the great majority of it consists of data. The commentary is minimal.
Secondly, I'm interested in fiscal responsibility and consider myself a fiscal conservative. As such, I agree with much of what the Concord Coalition promotes and have a great respect for their chairman, Pete Peterson. However, my interest began before the Concord Coalition came into existence.
Thirdly, I have some interest in the supply-side topic, at least in the extreme view that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts have paid for themselves. I find this interesting because I am yet to find a single budget document or credible economic study that even proposes this to be the case.
However, I am NOT in favor of high taxation. As you can see from the following graph, the top marginal rate is far below the level it was at from 1940 to 1980:
The actual numbers and sources are at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/recsrc.html I do not support a rise to anywhere near that level. However, I do think we may need to push some of the taxes back to their pre-Bush levels to deal with the deficits and coming Boomer retirement. In any event, I think that we need to reinstate PAY-GO to instill some minimal amount of discipline into the budget process.
Thanks for you replies, I'll now have to do a little research of my own.
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