Quote from JerryAdler:
WSJ: Tax Revenues = 19% of GDP, Regardless of Tax Rates
Weekend Wall Street Journal op-ed, There's No Escaping Hauser's Law, by W. Kurt Hauser (Stanford University, Hoover Institution):
Tax revenues as a share of GDP have averaged just under 19%, whether tax rates are cut or raised. Better to cut rates and get 19% of a larger pie.
Even amoebas learn by trial and error, but some economists and politicians do not. The Obama administration's budget projections claim that raising taxes on the top 2% of taxpayers, those individuals earning more than $200,000 and couples earning $250,000 or more, will increase revenues to the U.S. Treasury. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. None of the personal income tax or capital gains tax increases enacted in the post-World War II period has raised the projected tax revenues.
Over the past six decades, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have averaged just under 19% regardless of the top marginal personal income tax rate. The top marginal rate has been as high as 92% (1952-53) and as low as 28% (1988-90). This observation was first reported in an op-ed I wrote for this newspaper in March 1993. A wit later dubbed this "Hauser's Law."
Over this period there have been more than 30 major changes in the tax code including personal income tax rates, corporate tax rates, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, investment tax credits, depreciation schedules, Social Security taxes, and the number of tax brackets among others. Yet during this period, federal government tax collections as a share of GDP have moved within a narrow band of just under 19% of GDP.
Why? Higher taxes discourage the "animal spirits" of entrepreneurship. When tax rates are raised, taxpayers are encouraged to shift, hide and underreport income. Taxpayers divert their effort from pro-growth productive investments to seeking tax shelters, tax havens and tax exempt investments. This behavior tends to dampen economic growth and job creation. Lower taxes increase the incentives to work, produce, save and invest, thereby encouraging capital formation and jobs. Taxpayers have less incentive to shelter and shift income.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/11/wsj-hausers-law.html
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I think that using a constant means of computing it, the actual GDP has been decreasing steadily from about 1986, whereas using the bureau statistics you would get the impression that the GDP has been almost constant (on average) over the period 1986-2011, dropping only a little.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data
Wouldn't a constant revenue of 19% of GDP computed by the Bureau's method, which gives a higher GDP, suggest that nominal tax revenue has been rising over that period, relative to the real GDP computed by the 1980 formula? I would think so.
If that's true I'd like to suggest that the increase in nominal tax revenue has not been caused by tax rate decreases but instead by increases in government spending over that same period.
When the inflation rate and GDP calculation methods are being dickered with as well as tax rates, it is beyond my weak, non-economist brain to figure out much of anything. But logically to me it does seem far more likely that any nominal increases in tax revenue since 1986 have been the result of increased Government spending, which I think we all agree raises nominal tax revenues in the absence of an equivalent offsetting reduction in tax rates.
We are bombarded from one side of the political spectrum with the constant mantra that higher tax rates will destroy jobs and lead to lower productivity, but i'm having a very hard time believing it in light of the empirical evidence. I think it takes a giant leap of blind faith to believe "Higher taxes discourage the "animal spirits" of entrepreneurship."
Don't get me wrong though, I love low taxes. I just don't believe that minor changes in tax rate have much at all to do with "discouraging entrepreneurship." I tend to think that a modest increase in the upper marginal tax rate, as has been proposed, might be quite helpful at this juncture in reducing future inflation. I think we all could agree though that what is sorely needed is measured and careful fiscal reform to bring spending in line with revenues. But this is a very difficult time to be cutting -- a time when the private sector is leveraging down, and therefore for stability, the public sector needs to leverage up some. We have boxed ourselves into a corner by getting involved in too many unproductive and expensive wars we could not afford and then closing our eyes while Wall Street and the banking and mortgage industries ran roughshod over the second most important segment of the economy --well, that's if you ignore the porn industry.
