As you can see, tax cuts lead to falling revenues, tax hikes to rising revenues. Nor does cutting taxes have any restraining effect on government spending. On the contrary, the steepest fall in spending came after the 1993 tax increase. Nor does the tax rate have a big effect on economic growth; the strongest growth in this period came in the 1990s, after tax rates had been raised.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Still Lying about Taxes and Revenue
Just a note that Republican Congressmen, harassed by liberal agitators at recent town hall meetings, are still falling back on the Reaganite lie that cutting taxes increases revenue. No serious economist believes this; even Greg Mankiw, who was George W. Bush's chief economist for a while, put a section in his textbook debunking this myth. But the NY Times just caught Congressman Michael Grimm repeating this lie at a town hall in Brooklyn. In the service of truth, I present the following graph --dating to 2005, but nothing has happened since to change this -- showing the both revenue and government expenditure as percentages of GDP:
As you can see, tax cuts lead to falling revenues, tax hikes to rising revenues. Nor does cutting taxes have any restraining effect on government spending. On the contrary, the steepest fall in spending came after the 1993 tax increase. Nor does the tax rate have a big effect on economic growth; the strongest growth in this period came in the 1990s, after tax rates had been raised.
As you can see, tax cuts lead to falling revenues, tax hikes to rising revenues. Nor does cutting taxes have any restraining effect on government spending. On the contrary, the steepest fall in spending came after the 1993 tax increase. Nor does the tax rate have a big effect on economic growth; the strongest growth in this period came in the 1990s, after tax rates had been raised.
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