Saturday, December 27, 2014

Dick Cheney Was Present at the Birth of the Laffer Curve



Stephen Moore explains at WaPo:
It was 40 years ago this month that two of President Gerald Ford’s top White House advisers, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, gathered for a steak dinner at the Two Continents restaurant in Washington with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer, former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget. The United States was in the grip of a gut-wrenching recession, and Laffer lectured to his dinner companions that the federal government’s 70 percent marginal tax rates were an economic toll booth slowing growth to a crawl.

To punctuate his point, he grabbed a pen and a cloth cocktail napkin and drew a chart showing that when tax rates get too high, they penalize work and investment and can actually lead to revenue losses for the government. Four years later, that napkin became immortalized as “the Laffer Curve” in an article Wanniski wrote for the Public Interest magazine.

Murray Rothbard destroyed the Laffer Curve here:

6 comments:

  1. The youtube video is private.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A message, "This video is private," appears. Please advise.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is an example of why a 61 year old man, with a very long memory would visit your two websites every day. Thank you for continuing to expose what a bunch of liars many of America's heroes really were. Murray Rothbard had them nailed decades ago, but the public almost always embraces a well told lie.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ruined a perfectly good napkin.

    ReplyDelete
  5. He proved nothing. He presented hypotheticals, anecdotes and snyde remarks. Yup, a real intellectual giant.

    ReplyDelete