Robert A. Mundell, the 1999 Nobel Prizewinner in economics and in an easy argument the greatest economist of the last several generations, died April 4 in his beloved Italy at the age of 88....
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...
Take a couple of minutes to brush up on your free market knowledge with a crash course from Dr. Laffer. ...
It’s a fact: economists know that monetary policy caused the Great Depression. The economy of the late 1920s was overheated with a bloated stock market—caused by excessive tax cuts for the rich, unsupervised banks and overleveraged credit. The inevitable reckoning came at the hands of...
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...
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...
In today’s world of political economics, the topic of international trade is only large enough to accommodate two points of view: one that believes in free trade and one that believes in protectionist policies. You’re either in one group or the other. Both pure trade...
The voluble discussion over the prospective nomination of Stephen Moore to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System was undisciplined in many ways, not least in its characterization of the monetary history during the crucial decade of the 1980s. Bloggers and reporters, especially at the...
