> There are lots of reasonable objections
to raising taxes. You can decide that you don't think that tax
revenue is put to good uses. You can believe that ethically taxation
is theft. But there is no reasonable argument (at least none that
I've seen) that tax increases in any range we've seen in this country
don't raise revenue. - - Bill Dickens
I'll bite. I completely agree with Bill in the short-term. Higher
taxes raise revenue. But I also have a sneaking suspicion that higher
tax rates in the long run may hurt growth so much that the present value
of taxes would be higher if rates were lower. Just talking to people
who grew up in Scandinavia, they frequently tell me that high taxes had
no effect on the older generation. But (combined with the welfare
state) they raised a generation of shiftless, no-ambition slackers. If
the U.S. had Swedish-level taxes during the 80's, I suspect it would
have been a far less entrepreneurial and innovative economy in the 90's.
Econometric evidence? As far as I know, there's none either way, and
for obvious reasons. But it makes sense to me.
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://econlog.econlib.org
"[M]uch of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.
But surely the advice is grounded in research on children's
development? Yes, from the many useless studies that show
a correlation between the behavior of parents and the
behavior of their biological children and conclude that
parenting shapes the child, as if there were no such thing as
heredity."
--Steven Pinker, *The Blank Slate*
