Noteworthy Videos / December 28,2014

“You don’t want to make the rich poor; you want to make the poor richer,” says Dr. Arthur Laffer, an economist who laid the intellectual foundations for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing policies in the 1980s. But should we really be cutting services to the poor while we cut taxes for the rich? Has the spread of ‘Reaganomics’ really helped the world’s poor? In this episode of Head to Head, Mehdi Hasan challenges Dr. Arthur Laffer on whether free market economics still makes sense in the wake of the financial crisis, and on his famous ‘Laffer Curve,’ through which he advocates cutting taxes on high earners. Dr. Arthur Laffer has been described as “the father of supply-side economics”.

Noteworthy Videos / December 03,2014

For its 85th anniversary, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles the most disruptive ideas of the past 85 years. In 1974, economist Arthur Laffer sketches his theory of tax policy over dinner with Wall Street Journal writer Jude Wanniski and Ford administration officials Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, kick-starting the rise of supply-side economics. Forty years after one of the most famous dinner-napkin doodles in American history, Laffer, Cheney, and Rumsfeld reunited at that same restaurant.

Study / September 11,2012

Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are betting the future of the U.S. economy on a gamble that tax rates don’t matter: so raising income taxes, dividend taxes, and capital gains taxes in 2013, won’t hurt the economy. The evidence from the states, however, suggests just the opposite is true. We’ve looked at the…

Study / August 24,2012

Chairman Mary Schapiro of the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Wednesday that she did not have the required votes among the SEC commissioners to proceed with new proposed regulations on money market mutual funds (MMFs). In her statement, she then urged other policymakers to act “to address the systemic risks posed by money market funds.”…

Articles / March 19,2012

Tennessee is one of 19 states with a separate estate tax and one of only two states with a gift tax, which has caused the state to underperform in comparison to other right-to-work states and other states with no earned income tax, low corporate tax, and low overall tax burdens according to authors Arthur B.…

Articles / January 25,2012

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 President Obama again pointed to Warren Buffett’s call for higher taxes on the rich in making the case for tax increases during his State of the Union address.  Indeed, ever since Mr. Buffett’s August op-ed ran in the New York Times claiming that he does not pay enough in taxes and urging higher…

Articles / January 11,2012

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Laffer takes aim at class warfare rhetoric and proposals to raise taxes on the rich, explaining why such tax increases never raise the revenue or achieve the social justice that their advocates promise.  In particular, Dr. Laffer focuses on Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s famous calls for Washington…

Articles / April 18,2011

Tax compliance employs more workers than Wal-Mart, UPS, McDonald’s, IBM and Citigroup combined. There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government. To start with, individuals and businesses must pay the government the…