I spent all weekend thinking about Bob Mundell. I had just gotten the hard copy of my own book released several weeks ago, and I was reading it, beginning with the dedication: To Bob Mundell. Robert A. Mundell, the 1999 Nobel Prizewinner in economics and in an easy argument the greatest economist of the last…
On the death of legendary public servant George P. Shultz several days ago, the New Republic ran an extraordinary piece of historical reflection, Bruce Bartlett’s “George Shultz, the Godfather of the Discredited Laffer Curve.” Bartlett’s piece uses Shultz’s death as the merest of pretexts for its principal purpose, which is to ridicule Arthur Laffer’s turn…
Professor Saez, the Svengali of raising tax rates on the rich, argues that a tax rate of 73% on the top 1% of income earners raises the most revenues. Somehow, he must have overlooked the 1920s when the highest tax rate was cut from exactly 73% down to 25% and revenues exploded as never before.
When the recent public health crisis took shape in early March, one of the intriguing events that was postponed until the fall was a debate between Arthur Laffer and Emmanuel Saez on the issues of inequality, top income tax rates, and the possibility of a wealth tax. The debate was to have taken place at Pepperdine University in California. Saez, a proud man of the left, is one of the most prominent economists in the world—recent striking evidence being the honorary degree that Harvard University conferred upon him last year.
These series of charts offers a snapshot of West Virginia’s economic climate and how the state compares with other U.S. states. The charts were included in Dr. Laffer’s remarks to the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Meeting on September 2, 2015. Link to study: West Virginia Chartbook
For many countries around the world, the challenge of administering effective tobacco taxation has been to ensure the optimal level and structure of taxation that achieves the public health and public finance goals of governments. As I pointed out in my book, Handbook of Tobacco Taxation: Theory and Practice, many people believe that tax policies on tobacco…
President Obama’s FY 2016 budget plan includes a proposal to deny the standard business cost deduction to U.S.-based, foreign-owned companies for reinsurance premiums they pay to foreign reinsurance affiliates. That same proposal is carried over, though never enacted, from President Obama’s budgets for several recent years. Link to study: Do We Want Special Interest Trade…
Jimmy Pethokoukis, a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute, recently appeared on my friend Bill Bennett’s radio show. Based on his comments on Bill’s show, Jimmy wrote an article entitled “The right needs to get real on Reaganomics,” claiming that the Reagan tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves. Bill Bennett asked for my…
