Noteworthy Papers / January 06,2004

The story of how the Laffer Curve got its name isn’t one of the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. It began with a 1978 article published by Jude Wanniski in The Public Interest entitled, “Taxes, Revenues, and the ‘Laffer Curve.’” As recounted by Wanniski (associate editor of the Wall Street Journal at the time), in December of 1974 he had been invited to have dinner with me (then professor at the University of Chicago), Don Rumsfeld (chief of staff to President Gerald Ford) and Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld’s deputy and my former classmate at Yale) at the Two Continents Restaurant at the Washington Hotel in\ Washington, D.C. (just across the street from the Treasury). While discussing President Ford’s “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) proposal for tax increases, I supposedly grabbed my napkin and a pen and sketched a curve on the napkin illustrating the trade off between tax rates and tax revenues. Wanniski named the trade off “The Laffer Curve.”

Articles / August 24,1985

International Herald Tribune, Zurich – August 24/25, 1985 Washington – … The bulk of U.S. tax cuts began on Jan. 1, 1983, and the economic recovery began at the same time. Isn’t it amazing how tax reductions do not work until they take effect? More to the point, the downturn of 1981 and 1982 as…

Articles / March 04,1980

L.A. Times 3/4/80 Amid the crash and clatter of the presidential primaries, a quiet assault on America is proceeding unnoticed. The combatants are Americans and Japanese. Ironically, the assault on the American standard of living is being mounted by the Americans, while the Japanese defend us against our own worst inclinations. President Carter’s personally commissioned…

Articles / October 30,1979

Making the Dollar ‘as Good as Gold’ L.A. Times 10/30/79 The events of the past several weeks have served to make interest rates, reserve requirements and money supply targets of cocktail talk at all proper meeting places. What appears to be missing, however, is any serious discussion of a word understood by virtually everyone: gold.…