Yesterday, former Reagan administration economic adviser Arthur Laffer stopped by the Heritage Foundation for a lecture titled, “Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status”. Laffer popularized what has become to be known as the “Laffer Curve” which helped demonstrate that increased taxation can be counterproductive in the long-term as it leaves citizens with less resources and depresses economic growth.
After his speech, Laffer sat down for an “In the Green Room” segment where he discussed the roots of the financial crisis, how President Bush and Obama have mishandled the problem, and what to expect in 2010 and 2011.
Raising taxes does not mean more overall revenue, recently seen in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has had a particularly bad fiscal year after a recent tax hike. The county, which is just across the northern border of the District of Columbia, saw many residents making over $1 million move out when a tax hike was introduced in 2008, and now there are not enough high-income residents in the county to pay their share of taxes. The result of the high tax flight? The county now runs a budget deficit. The …
The New York Sun pokes fun at the Treasury Department, which this week released two reports assessing the impact of the 2003 tax cuts: We confess we stumbled a few times in making our way through the language, which seems at times to buy into left-wing assumptions. “Capital gains income, which is not captured in GDP, more than quadrupled between 1994 and 2000,” says one of the papers. “Tax receipts from capital gains realizations more than tripled during this period, even though the tax rate on capital gains was reduced …
