Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has expressed approval for a weaker dollar. Trump is promising higher tariffs. These moves threaten to undo the benefits of his work on tax cuts and regulations.
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by Henry Oliner ‘Trickle down’ is the preferred pejorative of the left towards any tax cut that benefits those who actually pay taxes. The people who use it sound like idiots to anyone with a basic knowledge of economics. It
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I have often wondered if Keynes would recognize the policies that are often carried out in his name. Art Laffer and Kenneth Peterson addressed this question in The Investor’s Business Daily in Obama Tax Hikes, Aimless Spending Ignore Keynes:
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Kevin Williamson writes Blue Voodoo in National Review. Excerpts: The point of rehearsing this history is not to determine whether traditional supply-side thinking on economic policy is true or false, but rather to show that it is something fundamentally different from the trickle-down caricature
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from What’s The Matter With Paul Krugman? by Steve Moore in The Investor’s Business Daily Excerpts: Krugman resorts to a line of argumentation that is all too typical of liberals: Cherry-picking a few events — the occasional high-tax state that
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“The chief argument voiced by Republicans in favor of keeping the full Bush tax cuts, including those in upper tax brackets, was that raising taxes on the “rich” would actually raise taxes on small businesses. This was correct. Most small
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Larry Kudlow writes in the National Review Online Obamanomics Has Failed Dismally, 9/14/12 Excerpts: More money doesn’t necessarily mean more growth. More Fed money won’t increase after-tax rewards for risk, entrepreneurship, business hiring, and hard work. Keeping more of what
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Thomas Sowell writes ‘Bait and Switch’ Taxes in The American Spectator, 9/5/12 excerpt: The Constitution of the United States had to be amended in 1913 to permit the federal government to collect income taxes. Almost immediately, very high tax rates
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In his book comparing the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics, Mark Skousen clarifies the various schools of thought by their faith in Capitalism. Marxists have no faith in capitalism. In the world of capitalism they are the atheists. “To
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Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit was finally released in exchange for 1027 Palestinian terrorists and captured cold blooded murderers. One should be reminded that Schalit was kidnapped on Israeli soil. Many have weighed in on whether the exchange was worth the
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When reading and reflecting on the history of our economic and financial condition it appears that we get it wrong more often than we get it right. Just as our history is a history of wars with brief interim periods
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Economist John Taylor writes an excellent article : The End of the Growth Consensus in the Wall Street Journal (7/21/11). Excerpts: Economic policy in the ’80s and ’90s was decidedly noninterventionist, especially in comparison with the damaging wage and price controls
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The Laffer Curve is an explanation of the dynamic effects of tax increases or decreases. In its basic model it looks like this: Of course this is a model to explain that there are points where raising tax rates may
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Supply side economics remains controversial and poorly understood both by its critics who think it is just ‘trickle down’ economics: a thinly veiled rationalization to improve the lives of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and by many
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To say that economics is about money is like saying art is about color. Money is a critical element, but it explains very little about the discipline. Many laymen confuse economics with finance. While the subjects substantially overlap, our recent
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Brian Domitrovic’s Econoclasts writes of the rise of supply side economics as proposed by Nobel prize winning economist Robert Mundell and his intellectual emissaries, most notably Arthur Laffer. The core of Mundell’s theory was that monetary policy should do only
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So I am lucky to catch a debate on Bloomberg on the topic “Does government stifle the American Spirit?” On the side taking the affirmative (that government does in fact stifle the American Spirit) is my favorite economist, Arthur Laffer,
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Economist Arthur Laffer in his Wall Street Journal article, Unemployment Benefits Aren’t Stimulus, notes how much better off we would be if the government had tried a different stimulus. Any government program that would reduce unemployment has to make working
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In Econoclasts author Brian Domitrovic chronicles the rise of the supply side revolution, the economic prescription that ended the stagflation of the 1970’s and sparked a strong economic growth that lasted over 20 years. Arthur Laffer, of the famous Laffer
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Nancy Pelosi states that the new unemployment benefits package should be passed because unemployment benefits stimulate the economy and thus create jobs. They are in fact, according to her, one of the best job creators because the unemployment benefits are
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