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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (103369)	2/6/2009 2:28:31 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542043

It's odd how the unspecified Laffer curve has dictated 30-odd years of Republican economic dogma. Its done nothing of the sort, not by itself at least, it can't. It doesn't proscribe any rates. BTW its also a theory that if stated correctly even Krugman would support (possibly while dimissing its insight as obvious and trivial, and also bashing those who would set the inflection point very low) Odder still, both the Reagan tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts were followed by huge budget deficits Nothing odd about that, either in a general sense or specifically connected to the Laffer curve. Spending rapidly grew at the time. Tax cuts + lots of new spending, generally results in deficits, at least if your not starting out with large surpluses. Interestingly Obama has also called for tax cuts, and he's certainly calling for lots of new spending. Perhaps he's more like Bush than I thought... But the problem with his tax cuts is they lose much of the benefit, by not reducing marginal rates. Another problem is they probably really aren't tax cuts when you consider that "tax cuts" to below zero are handouts not tax cuts, and when you consider he's using a baseline that starts with tax increases "let the tax cuts expire", not current tax rates.