All the while the economy in positive territory.
We had two recessions.
As for your first link econdataus.com its a pretty unusual chart. It not a chart of revenue and spending, but in changes in revenue and spending. A chart of revenue and spending over time clearly shows you the changes, you can look at the slope and see if each is up or down. A chart of the derivative, of the percentage change in each over time has to be read a little more carefully. Showing a downward slope doesn't indicate a reduction, it can just be a reduction in the rate of increase. Also for most of the period of time covered by that chart the actual increase is positive.
As for your 2nd link and its data, well that does show and actual reduction in revenue from 2000 to 2004, but having a reduction when you have gone from a boom and stock bubble to a recession is something that can easily occur even without any change in tax rates.
The point about lower taxes increasing revenue is not something that is really always true, but when it does work it works by increasing growth. That doesn't mean that it causes economic boom times or short run revenue increases. If your going in to a recession anyway than at best it probably just makes the recession a little less steep. You still get an economic slowdown and with lower rates you likely get less revenue in the short run unless you where starting out with either very high rates or very perversely structured taxes. The extra economic growth is not necessarily very large. It likely takes a long time for extra revenue to actually come about, and by than the tax rates will have changed again, and 50 million other changes will have occurred.
"Extra revenue" doesn't imply "extra revenue now", or even in a couple of years, if the rates where not too high and so the avoidance/evasion issue was manageable and its only about extra growth, it could be extra revenue 20 years later, when the extra growth finally catches up to the lower percentage the government is taking. But in 20 years you have so many tax changes and other changes that there is no way to rigorously account for all of them in your evaluation. The data is simply going to be very messy. |
