[quote=gandalf]Art Laffer? Good grief. The dude’s a carnival barker.
Tax cuts get thrown in with all kinds of other more important historical economic variables and conditions (business cycles, wars, oil shocks, currency markets, bubbles and panics, etc.). It’s impossible to isolate any causation, or even correlation. Nobody has proven anything.
Supply-side is a political slogan, not economics.
However, there’s a strong correlation between tax cuts and public sector borrowing. Easy to connect those dots. Often the people chirping about tax cuts are the same ones hawking about deficits. No hypocrisy there.
I think we should cut taxes, on income, and especially at middle class levels. Hell, I’d even go for a flat tax — provided public receipts can be recouped through offseting reductions in TAX AVOIDANCE, especially for corporations and wealthy individuals. Avoidance is the real problem.
Again, supply-side is mostly politics, not economics.[/quote]
Precisely, gandalf!
Everyone likes to point to the “growth” during the Reagan years and also after the Bush tax cuts “for the wealthy.” IMHO, they never discuss the exponential credit expansion and/or deficit spending going on during these periods.
