by Dan Mitchell | Jan 24, 2018 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
Last November, I wrote about the lessons we should learn from tax policy in the 1950s and concluded that very high tax rates impose a very high price. About six months before that, I shared lessons about tax policy in the 1980s and pointed out that Reaganomics was a...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 12, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Supply Side, Taxation
In my decades of trying to educate policymakers about the downsides of class-warfare tax policy, I periodically get hit with the argument that high tax rates don’t matter since America enjoyed a golden period of prosperity in the 1950s and early 1960s when the top tax...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 14, 2017 | Blogs, Economics
Supply-side economics is simply the common-sense notion that people respond to incentives, though some folks think this elementary observation is “voodoo economics” or “trickle-down economics.” If you want a wonkish definition of supply-side economics, it is the...
by Dan Mitchell | May 8, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
The tax system is bad news for professional sports, with plenty of anecdotal evidence showing that athletes (and even fans) get pillaged by government. Now we have some comprehensive academic research to augment the anecdotes. The Wall Street Journal opined today on a...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 20, 2017 | Blogs, Taxation
Back in 2014, I shared some data from the Tax Foundation that measured the degree to which various developed nations punished high-income earners. This measure of relative “progressivity” focused on personal income taxes. And that’s important because that levy often...