aflanigan wrote:
Here's the actual paragraph:

I suppose you could play games with this awkwardly-worded statement, but I think your time would be better spent reading the article and absorbing what it points out: that the only reliable way to boost tax revenue is to have a rising GDP. Raising tax rates (as the article you linked to recommends) won't increase the fraction of GDP we capture in taxes—at least it never has. Or is this time different?

 Lazy8 wrote: 

Whoa.  The crash of tax collections that accompanied the burst of the dot com bubble led to the recession that followed, according to the link you cite?  This suggests to me that we need to boost income tax revenues to spur economic recovery.  Thanks for the confirmation!

 oldslabsides wrote: 
pessimist:
 

Richard is working on our exit strategy (and he really is that huge!). 

 islander wrote: 
How much can it be increased?  How much is sustainable?  We do - by the way - live on a finite rock.

I know, I'm grabbing at the wheel and trying steer the thread into the ditch. 

 beamends wrote: 
to paraphrase CC - That's crazy talk.

 islander wrote: 
My God man, steady on, that's dangerously close to saying balancing the budget is a good idea

 cc_rider wrote: 
Although that is true, what I'm really saying is that we can point to events that show all four conditions (+taxes/+revenues, +taxes/-revenues, -taxes/+revenues, -taxes/-revenues) at different periods in time. So maybe taxes aren't really a lever for revenues. Maybe it would make more sense to set taxes at a level that will cover expenditures, then work to control expenditures as much as possible.

 islander wrote:
  What? Are you implying the same set of data can be analyzed in different ways and produce different results and conclusions? That is crazy talk, man.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
If we look at the data from both sides we can see that adjustments to the marginal rate and the following delta in revenues are not closely coupled (we can show both increases and decreases following tax hikes and cuts). So maybe this isn't the point we should be arguing. We need to find a way to increase economic activity on all fronts *and* have a sane and equitable tax policy to fund the needs of our society. All the crap going on in DC now addresses neither of these.

 romeotuma wrote:
Go read it, then look at the pretty colored graphs. Now look at all the areas that show revenue growth (some of them as brief as two years!) that followed tax increases.

Now look at the other areas of revenue growth that didn't follow tax increases. Sure are a lot of them, aren't there? Guess those don't compute.

Now look at the regions of revenue growth that started well before the tax increases (particularly the 1968 10% tax surcharge) and disappeared after they were imposed. Look also at the regions where a decline in revenue preceded a tax decrease (the end of the dot-com bubble, for instance). The 1991 tax increases that were supposed to be responsible for the Clinton era revenue climb had almost no effect for the first three years they were enacted (OK, revenue dropped slightly at first, then climbed the dot-com bubble). Tax cuts must be powerful indeed if they can reduce revenue before they're enacted! These tweaks to marginal tax rates are Congress tinkering in reaction to events in the economy, not causative factors.

Another interesting area is the period from 1950-1963. Crawford ends his red band at 1953 (he uses a 1% decrease in a top marginal rate of 92% to signal a period following a tax cut) when taxes remained essentially flat thru the period. This is not the monotonic function he's pretending it is.

Keep in mind that the general trend (since WW2) has been to decrease the top marginal tax rates, so any phenomenon is going to appear associate with falling taxes.

The above article isn't serious analysis, it's the economic equivalent of quote mining. The red swaths on the graph are trying to obscure the fundamental truth of Hauser's Law: income tax top brackets ranged between 92% and 28% over the period represented by the graph. If revenue correlated directly to top marginal rate it would jump out of that graph like a stripper out of a birthday cake. It doesn't. Hauser's Law remains a valid and important observation of the lack of coupling between marginal tax rates and revenue. It's still inconveniently true.

...and this is the history that tax increase advocates either can't or will not absorb, and Republicans seem too witless to explain. It's a very inconvenient truth.

Poet George Santayana is credited with the aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

The Decade the GOP Hopes You've Forgotten