Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

[Munger]

Re: Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

[metalman]

Re: Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

You can bet that there will be terrorist threats and lots of red alert days to give the public something else to focus on. But yeah, eventually the people will open their eyes - not being able to feed your kids tends to do that.

California unemployment hits 6.8%

that's the official bullshit stats rate. really, what, twice that? how about the los angeles tinderbox?

[Mega]

Re: Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

Yes, good point i was going to ask you Metal man about the forth coming riots. I recall:-

Watts (68?)
LA in 91

.............and something in Forida in 1980?

Mike

[Master Shake]

Re: Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

What a scam. The surplus was used to offset the shortfalls in I.R.S. revenue due to Reagan and Bush tax cuts that primarily benefited the richest Americans.

I believe you'll find that Government revenues rose after the Reagan tax cuts and after the Bush II tax cuts. The problem is not that the government is taxing too little, but that it is spending too much.

[FRED]

Re: Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

I believe you'll find that Government revenues rose after the Reagan tax cuts and after the Bush II tax cuts. The problem is not that the government is taxing too little, but that it is spending too much.

The Laffer curve is used to illustrate the concept of "taxable income elasticity", which is the idea that government can maximize tax revenue by setting tax rates at an optimum point and that neither a 0% tax rate nor a 100% tax rate will generate government revenue. The curve was popularized by Arthur Laffer (b. 1940), although the underlying principle was known since the time of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (1377). John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, described how increasing taxation past a certain point might lower revenue and vice versa.^[1] Libertarian economist Ludwig Von Mises wrote in 1949: "In the United States the recent advances in tax rates produced only negligible revenue results beyond what would be produced by a progression which stopped at much lower rates".^[2] Other economists have questioned the utility of the Laffer Curve. According to Nobel prize laureate James Tobin, "[t]he "Laffer Curve" idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981."^[3]

The Laffer-curve concept is central to supply side economics, and the term was reportedly coined by Jude Wanniski (a writer for The Wall Street Journal) after a 1974 afternoon meeting between Laffer, Wanniski, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy press secretary Grace-Marie Arnett (Wanninski, 2005; Laffer, 2004). In this meeting, Laffer reportedly sketched the curve on a napkin to illustrate the concept, which immediately caught the imaginations of those present. Laffer himself professes no recollection of this napkin, but writes, "I used the so-called Laffer Curve all the time in my classes and with anyone else who would listen to me" (Laffer, 2004). Laffer also does not claim to have invented the concept, attributing it to 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun and, more recently, to John Maynard Keynes.

Empirical evidence

Laffer, in an article published at the Heritage Foundation, has pointed to Russia and the Baltic states who have recently instituted a flat tax with rates lower than 35%, and whose economies started growing soon after implementation. He has also referred to the economic success following the Kemp-Roth tax act, the Kennedy tax cuts, the 1920s tax cuts, and the changes in US capital gains tax structure in 1997 as examples of how tax cuts can cause the economy to grow and thus increase tax revenue.^[4][5]

At least one empirical study, looking at actual historical data on tax rates, GDP, and revenue, placed the revenue-maximizing tax rate (the point at which another marginal tax rate increase would decrease tax revenue) as high as 80%. Paul Samuelson argues in his popular economic textbook that Reagan was correct in a very limited sense to view the intuition underlying the Laffer curve as accurate, because as a successful actor, Reagan was subject to marginal tax rates as high as 90% during World War II. The point is that in a progressive tax system, any given person's perspective on the validity of the Laffer curve will be influenced by the marginal tax rate to which that person's income is subject.

Others have noted that federal revenues, as a percentage of GDP, have remained stable at approximately 19.5% over the period 1950 to 2007 despite significant changes in margin tax rates over the same period. They argue that since federal revenue is proportional to GDP, the most key to increasing revenue is to increase GDP. - WikiPedia

The official iTulip position on the Laffer curve is that is an ideological invented to serve political ends. Independent economists have never taken the concept seriously because it does not take into account real dynamics in ever-changing economic systems which account for factors of growth which far outweigh the factors of the influence of taxes on economic behavior (e.g., increased GDP from oil production and export in Russia after a flat tax was implemented, increased GDP from the FIRE Economy in the US after Reagan tax cuts were implemented, etc.)

We do not think taxes are too low in the US. We propose taxes on capital gains earned by entrepreneurs who found businesses lowered to zero. We propose that taxes on productivity and consumption be lowered and on economic rent, such as interest on mortgage loans earned by lenders, and on certain kinds of property be raised to compensate for the revenue shortfall created by the cuts, in effect reverting the US tax code back to the pre-FIRE era system of the 1920s that encouraged industrial versus property development.

[jtabeb]

Re: Rogers puts in in a nut shell!

We propose that taxes on productivity and consumption be lowered and on economic rent, such as interest on mortgage loans earned by lenders, and on certain kinds of property be raised to compensate for the revenue shortfall created by the cuts, in effect reverting the US tax code back to the pre-FIRE era system of the 1920s that encouraged industrial versus property development.

HERE HERE, and AMEN!!!!!