MrRodgers
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Joined: 7/30/2005
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ORIGINAL: subrosaDom
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ORIGINAL: njlauren
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ORIGINAL: DomKen
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ORIGINAL: mnottertail
Well here is a laffer curve, (actually find the maximum area under the curve, from calculus) problem is, neither Art Laffer or anyone else who is of the nutsacker persuasion understands it, and think it means cut taxes. It means anything but, for each segment of the earning folk, there is a maximization point, a maximum amount of tax that can be extracted from each earner in each different strata without materially affecting their life, nor their earning desire.
this of course requires hard data and known variables, since not all income flows weekly or bi-weekly, nor is the life of each strata equivalent. The fools that tout this shit (nutsackers) are masturbating in fantasy and saying Lo, here!!! Lo, there!!! but they are fucking inept as well as innumerate.
Definitively it can be said that the Laffer curve brought to America one great thing.
St. Wrinklemeat said that he would not do more than 4 pictures a year since the taxes ate him up. So, there is the positive, it kept us from too many Reagan movies.
Incidentally, a non-sequitur to be taken up by others, because they did not make the income Reagan did, nor do they work as second banana to chimpanzees.
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Not ever to defend Laffer who is wrong on just about everything but that was not his argument.
Basically he argues that tax revenue versus tax rate would produce a bell graph. Therefore for tax rates above the peak of the curve you should be able to cut taxes and immediately see an increase in tax revenue. He's been disproven many many times but that doesn't stop the nuts but you should at least get his idea right.
The problem with Laffer and the whole supply side economic theory is that tax cuts as they propose them tend to go to the well off, the problem with that being that the stimulus from doing that is limited, because the people in those brackets for each extra dollar they get doesn't spur all that much activity. For example, cutting the capital gains rate was supposed to increase capital formation that would create jobs, but what it ended up doing, besides cutting tax revenue, was increase wealth in the top 1% without spurring much growth (investment income in the top 1% increased at a rate of 10% a year for the past 8 years or so, but GDP grew only at a very small amount, if at all. Ironically, dollars spent by the government generate a lot more economic activity, the multiplier rate with government spending, because it tends to go to those in the middle and lower classes, who when given a dollar spend it, then with taxes which for every dollar they get, the top 1% spend very little.
The top 1% invest. As you well know. Whether directly or indirectly through deposits in banks or other financial institutions, which themselves invest it. Unless they stuff their money under a mattress, it goes to work in some sense. If they own a company, it becomes jobs. (This doesn't apply with many charities, but it does apply with microloans and other things like that.)
There is an ethical issue too. The top are already paying more marginally. It's not a tax cut. Further, a cut suggests the money belongs to the government. Actually the government only takes. It earns nothing. Its attempts at running businesses have been pretty poor. Japan and other industrial powers fared no better. The government can't pick winners and losers, especially because the losers often don't lose, as they do in the free market.
Was Laffer entirely correct? No. But a reductio ad absurdum shows, too, that if taxes were ideal, then we ought to tax everyone at 100%. Or how about, per M. Hollande, at 70%? Not working out so well for him, either. Capital, as does water, seeks its lowest (taxed) level. It's contrary to human nature to expect people to work harder for something when they get a lesser amount of the reward.
As far as your comments about the middle and lower classes, much of those claims rely on static analyses, that assume there is no upward or downward movement among income and wealth quintiles. This is palpably false. Looking at mere percentages in a quintile tells you very little. It's who is in the quintile, how old they are, and why they're there.
But there are middle class people paying a higher rate than investors whose discount has been justified by the so-called investment incentive.
That is patently ridiculous because if the top income tax rate is incentive enough for a good salary, then the same rate is incentive enough for the investors class who in fact make most of their money buying and selling equities, (paper) that creates no jobs at all.
The Laffer tax cuts scam was exposed by Reagan's own adviser and OMB director David Stockman as a ruse and just another version of trickle down which we all know also to be...bullshit.
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RE: This is a known failure. Why continue this idiocy? - 
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