By the time George W. Bush took office at the start of this new century, the United States in its 225 year history had run up a modest debt of $5.7 trillion. Just before Bush, the Clinton administration had even notched a surplus in its final three years.
And yet… Read More »
In 2016, an analysis by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported that the "tax gap" – the amount of taxes Americans owed but failed to pay – reached almost half a trillion dollars a year for the years 2008 through 2010, an average annual loss of $458 billion. By so… Read More »
The Senate has produced a 2,700 page bill to provide roughly $1 trillion for infrastructure improvement across the next 10 years but with only the vaguest notions of how to pay for it, not least because Republicans disallowed inclusion of… Read More »
"Nobody in politics wants to deal with Social Security a second before they have to", quipped Alan Simpson, the towering former Republican senator from Wyoming. That again held true… Read More »
Yet another of President Trump's promises to his base, not that it was requested, was to "totally destroy" the 1954 Johnson Amendment that forbids churches and other non-profits from promoting or opposing political candidates on penalty of losing their tax-exempt status.
The House pulled a fast one by obligingly putting repeal of the amendment in its tax bill, as if it by some twisted logic church sermons met the "reconciliation" rules explained above. Fortunately, there is the "Byrd rule",… Read More »
For fiscal 2017 the nation's deficit reached $666 billion, the sixth highest on record. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, if no countering action is 
taken, the deficit 10 years out will reach almost $1.5 trillion. That's for the single year 2027. And it doesn't count the added $1.5 trillion leeway the House and Senate have awarded themselves in a budget resolution to give their tax reform plan running room.
"These numbers should… Read More »
If nothing is done, Social Security is forecast to go broke. Expenditures began exceeding payroll tax revenues for the first 
time in 2010, and payouts are nibbling away at the so-called "trust fund" which, at its peak before the downturn, held four times the amount of annual expenditures. It sounds like a far off problem, except if left to fester, remedies will become intolerably drastic.
Proposed fixes are typically to curtail benefits in one or another way. But pulling in the other direction is a progressive wing that has stirred debate with the argument that there is a "retirement crisis", that the elderly poor are in trouble, that benefits should be increased. That was the long-held view of Tom Harkin, ex-senator of Iowa, and the baton has passed to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who took up the cause starting with a Senate speech in 2013. Now. both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have signed on.
The Republican candidates are in the opposite camp. Most propose… Read More »
The United States tax code is a monstrosity that now exceeds a morbidly obese 70,000 pages. Politicians in Congress speak in platitudes about the need for its overhaul but turn away proposals. Year-long committee work led by House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) that resulted in a comprehensive tax overhaul plan disappeared as soon as introduced last year (“Blah, blah, blah” was House Speaker John Boehner's reaction). Despite all the talk, Congress has done nothing since the Tax Reform Act of 1984 of the Reagan years.
But evidently having a tax reform plan has become a prerequisite for the Republican nomination. One after another of the candidates has come forth with his (Carly Fiorina not yet) notion of how to rescue the nation from the code's thicket of brambles. It will come as a no surprise that all solutions result in tax cuts that can be dangled before the electorate, 48% of which consider tax reform a key issue (terrorism rules at 76%).
flatliningThe flat tax, that hoary perennial that will not go away, has several standard bearers. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Ben Carson and John Kasich want today's seven brackets reduced to a single rate. Cruz exhumed the old enticement of tax returns so simple as to "fit on the back of postcard".
Rand Paul, always fun, took it much further in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, "Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over". And he meant it. Out would go the 4 million words of the tax code and all its special interest loopholes. Replacing it would be a flat rate of 14.5% on incomes over $50,000 for a family of four and the same rate on business in the form of a value added tax. Of course, he doesn’t call it a VAT, because the invention comes from socialist Europe. Paul would do away with payroll taxes and use the income from the VAT to fund Social Security and Medicare instead.
The senator admits that of the face of it the government would be shy $2 trillion in revenue over 10 years, but he's made pilgrimage to Arthur Laffer in Nashville, who preaches that tax cuts spur growth that leads to higher tax income than before the cuts and who continues to believe that phenomenon might actually happen someday.
Dr. Ben Carson wants a flat tax, inspired by the Bible's tithe. When told the 10% to 15% he is thinking of must be higher to raise the revenue the government needs and that higher rates would therefore harm the poor, he responded that it’s “very condescending” to say that poor people can’t pay the same tax rate as the wealthy. “I can tell you that poor people have pride, too".
Mike Huckabee espouses the FairTax, which gets rid of both the income tax and payroll taxes entirely and replaces them with a 23% national sales tax charged on all goods and services other than the cost of necessities.
The premise of flat and fair is to treat everyone alike, irrespective of income. Compared to today's graduated scheme that increases the tax rate as income rises, a single rate applied to everyone, in the guise of simplification and "fairness", results in an enormous gift to the wealthiest among us. Top earners would see their nominal tax rates cut — using Rand Paul's specific 14.5% — by almost two-thirds from the top rate of 39.6% .
More than that, a flat tax is irredeemably regressive. For workers at the low end of the economic scale, all earnings are taxed, whether as income at the flat tax rate, or, in the Huckabee variation, because all earnings are unavoidably spent and subject to his tax built into the elevated cost of most everything they buy. Those at the high end of the income scale don't spend all their income, and that not spent is not taxed. Under these proposals, the rich get richer at a time of increasing concern that income inequality is tearing at the fabric of society.
Marco Rubio is taking heat for the plan he drew up with Mike Lee, Republican Senator from Utah. They would crunch today's graduated tax on income to just two rates: 15% and 35%. Singles would reach the 35% bracket with an income of just $75,000. For couples, income above $150,000 would be taxed at the 35%. Compare that to today's earner not reaching the slightly higher 39.6% top bracket until income crosses $464,851.
The high rate kicking in at low thresholds seems necessary to pay for the rest of the Rubio/Lee plan, which does away with all taxes on capital gains, dividends and estate inheritance — the rich need help — and gives parents a $2,500 deduction for every child. In what the The Wall Street Journal lambastes as "using the tax code for social policy", Rubio and Lee champion the child credit as literally an award to parents for "raising the next generation of taxpayers who will grow up to fund the Social Security and Medicare of all future seniors". Their plan would run up the national debt by $4 trillion over a decade. The Bush tax cuts "only" sunk us $1.5 trillion further in debt.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to return to the tax rates of the Reagan era, which, by the time Reagan left office, had been slashed to 15% and 28%. If he means that literally, he might need to test the math. Reagan's top rate kicked in at around $58,000, according to tables adjusted to today's dollars at the Tax Foundation (married, filing jointly). That won't win votes. Today, 28% doesn't start until one crosses $151,200.
Like others, Christie believes his plan would bring in the same amount of revenue by eliminating tax deductions and credits, although he speaks of them as only "up for negotiation". But the biggest — home mortgage interest and charity contributions — would be off limits for Christie (maybe not interest on second homes). Trouble is, there aren't enough deductions to pay for the drop in government income that the Reagan rates bring in.
It's odd that politicians are drawn to just two or three tax rates, as if today's seven are just too mindbogglingly complex. One speculates that they've never done their own taxes and having never dealt with the worksheets and the linguistic tangles ("if line 6 exceeds line 36 of form 1040, and line 6 is less than 0, then go to line 9 else"…and so forth) think that the simple brackets are the complexity the public loathes.
Ted Cruz wants to get rid of the IRS altogether; rather unfair considering that it is Congress that serves up the changes that special interests lobby for — 4,430 averaging 1-a-day in the new century's first decade — yet it is the IRS that takes the heat for the convoluted instructions they must devise.
But, of course, like street waifs passing a bakery, looking at the pastries through the window, that is as close as Republicans will get to their delectable schemes. Special interests will come by to remind Congress members of the campaign funding they'll lose if a pet exemption is removed and if one of these candidates reach the Oval Office, he will watch one confection after sold off to Congress' rich corporate patrons. But for the moment it's fun to look through the window.
Comment?Our article of two months ago — Congress Can’t Even Fix the Gas Tax" — made the obvious point that, with our roads and bridges falling into disrepair, the tax on gasoline and diesel should be increased. Not increased, actually — just adjusted for inflation.
Since that article, which treats the subject in greater detail, the price of oil has dropped below $50 a barrel and gasoline is under $2 a gallon in much of the nation. It is the perfect moment to adjust the tax. Senators Bob Corker (R-Tn) and Chris Murphy (D-Ct) have proposed a 6 cents a gallon increase each year for two years, yet the new Republican-controlled Congress, even though safely ensconced in their seats and protected by a full two years until the next election, is too timid to take any action. With next to nothing to be done other than to raise the rate of a tax already in place, we have John Boehner on "60 Minutes" answering Scott Pelli about a gas tax increase with, "we believe that through tax reform" — you know, that tax reform that never happens — "we can find the funds to fund a long-term highway bill".
The Obama administration is silent on the issue as well. It prefers to get the money from the illusory elimination of "corporate tax loopholes" rather than alienate with a cost increase the middle class it has chosen to champion as its last hurrah.
In effect since 1956, the tax rate was last set at 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline (24.4 cents for diesel) in 1993 and has not changed since, with the result that inflation has evaporated the buying power of the gas tax to about 11 cents a gallon and 14.5 for diesel. Other factors — Americans use more fuel efficient cars, some of them hybrids, to drive less — reduce the take still more. Anyone driving the interstates these days is likely to come upon long stretches of highway with shifted lanes and concrete barriers but no construction equipment or crews in sight — projects halted for lack of funds in keeping with the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) facing a deficit of an estimated $160 billion over the next decade. Some 70,000 bridges are considered to be "structurally deficient".
Yet in a week when yet another bridge collapsed (photo), The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled "Abolish the Gas Tax", (and just two 
One dead in Cincinnati bridge collapse
weeks after publishing an op-ed titled "Top 10 Reasons to Abolish the Corporate Income Tax"). Why not abolish all taxes and see what happens.
The American Society of Civil Engineers in 2013 gave the nation’s roads a near failing grade of "D"and bridges "C+" but the editorial writers call it a "myth" that U.S. roads and bridges are "crumbling". The "solons" in Congress who would like to fix the tax are called "gougers" set upon ruining U.S. consumers' "lucky break" of cheap gas. Leave the tax as is, says the WSJ's own solons and "some projects would merely be delayed, or states and cities would fill the gaps". Those mere delays are what have led to the nation's collapsing infrastructure but we are cheered to learn that states and cities are awash in money.
"The 47,714 miles of the interstate highway…system was officially finished in 1992", so "it is less rational for drivers nationwide to send so many dollars to Washington". If you can make sense of their apparent beliefe that roads do not need maintenance, then why their other gripe that the HTF has diverted funds to mass transit, light rail, ferries, bike lanes and other modes of transport. Perhaps it's the word "highway" in the HTF name, but it is not made clear why it is improper to spend on other ways consumers use to get to work.
Such diversions have "increased 38% since 2008" but no data is given about how much of the total fund goes to other transportation purposes. Better to leave the reader fuming that diversions also include "sidewalks, hiking trails, urban planning and even landscaping" than to point out whatever tiny amounts are involved, if at all. It is a confused presentation. "Today, the costs of transportation can be reasonably borne by the people who enjoy the benefits", the editorial says. Well, yes, that's what the gas tax is for. Possibly they mean people within states paying for their own roads. To really assure that the nation's infrastructure falls to pieces, the more doctrinaire Republicans want the entire burden of maintaining roads and bridges to be borne by the states as part of their unending campaign to Balkanize the United States into 50 economically disparate zones. It is a particularly inept application of that doctrine inasmuch as roads do not end at state lines. ("Caution: sudden change in road conditions as you are entering a poorer state").
The gas and diesel tax may not perfectly correlate to road use but it has the advantage of being in place, and the money is needed right now. Better schemes such as a fee based on vehicle mileage, which would have to be collected directly from vehicle owners, will take years to implement. If Republicans can't summon the gumption to accomplish something as simple and necessary as marking up the tax to account for inflation, what should we expect when they confront difficult issues over the next two years?
Comment?Burger King is the latest example of other countries successfully luring U.S. companies to relocate. While countries around the world have engaged in a downward spiral of lowering corporate tax rates to lure corporate migration, the United States has moved in the opposite direction.
With the highest statutory corporate rate of the 34 developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. has deigned not to compete. We will keep our rate the same at 35%, thank you. Worse, the U.S. is almost the only country that taxes a company’s profits when they are brought home no matter where in the world they were earned.
To avoid the IRS, corporations at one time could simply reincorporate in tax havens such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, but in 2004 and again in 2012, Congress passed legislation that made “that type of tax strategy virtually
American companies boast a strong record of product creation and marketing, but innovation doesn't stop there. They have been innovative in their financial back offices as well, devising ever new ways to avoid paying taxes on their profits.
There is general agreement that the U.S. tax code has become such a thicket of brambles that it should be torn out by its roots. There is also general agreement that so many corporate interests will fight to preserve their particular tax loopholes that wholesale reform from a Congress reliant on campaign contributions from those same corporations is wishful thinking. The question is whether anything can be accomplished toward what ought to be done.
The tax code — corporate or individual — hasn’t been overhauled in a quarter of a century and has become overgrown with loopholes, exceptions, subsidies and other means of tax avoidance that result in corporations, even those in the same industry, paying wildly different rates. The tax code, in a word, is a shambles.
Nominally, the rate for larger businesses is 35%, second only to Japan’s as the highest in the world, and therefore hurting the competitiveness and growth of U.S. companies, so goes the argument. There is a widespread consensus that to make U.S. companies more competitive the 35% tax rate should be cut, but only in return for eliminating the loopholes. But to bring into the Treasury’s coffers at least the same revenue as the present tax scheme means that all tax breaks must be eliminated, according to Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Not just the President’s oft-cited subsidies for oil and gas exploration and corporate jets — they don’t come close to making up revenue lost by a rate cut — but creditable tax breaks such as accelerated write-offs of equipment purchases intended… Read More »
Joe Biden commendably intends for his American Families Plan to be paid for. That requires raising taxes. His plan "doesn't add a single penny to our deficits", is his claim.
The… Read More »
Trump says he signed the most pieces of legislation of any president in recent history. He's actually signed the fewest bills since any president dating back to Eisenhower. But Mr. Trump has the strange and unwell compulsion of having to tell himself, to the point of internalizing the belief, that everything he does is more grand than anything that has gone before.
the whopperBut those examples are not what we mean as his biggest lie.… Read More »
"It's the largest tax cut in the history of our country", President Trump is repeatedly telling us. In fact, Reagan's in 1986 was bigger, as were five other cuts since, even Obama's in 2013 when he extended and made permanent the Bush tax cuts. The president artfully chose not to use inflation-adjusted dollars.
Comment?In order to force the bill through the Senate with only the simple majority of 51 votes, Senate rules required that it not at the end of its 10-year lifespan result in a continuing deficit. Congressional Republicans had given themselves a lavish allowance of $1.5 trillion to play with, but as one after another eliminated deduction was restored in whole or part, reducing revenue and overdrawing the allowance, the legislators looked about and found their solution in… Read More »
Unlike everywhere else in the U.S., every Alaskan gets a royalty for oil produced (the term for bringing it to the surface) from the state's wells. Citizens needn't do a thing, yet each has in the past received as much as a few thousand dollars annually.
Production has declined in recent years, so in early November, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a heroine for voting against Obamacare repeal and replacement, showed her other colors by introducing legislation that, for the… Read More »
For years we have heard, from left and right alike, of the need to simplify the confoundingly complex and grotesquely bloated tax code. The Republican resolve born of control of both Congress and the presidency told the party the moment has finally come.
Not quite yet, it turns out. Not simplification. As ever, protests have greeted attempts to eliminate each "loophole", deduction or exemption whose elimination is needed to pay for the tax rate cuts, with other high-minded goals… Read More »
The near death experience of Knight Capital was only the latest in a series of improvised explosive devices that have rocked the markets and caused individual investors, some believe, to run for cover rather than continue investing in stocks. Inadequately tested software ran wild for a full 45 minutes at Knight, causing a $400 million loss for a firm that accounted for fully 11% of all trading in the first half of the year.
In March a software glitch at BATS Global Markets, the nation’s third largest exchange, buffeted the markets by disrupting trading for a sector of the alphabet that included BATS itself, blocking trading in the firm’s own stock on the day it went public.
And then there was high-frequency trader Infinium Capital Management in February 2010. Much like at Knight, software algorithms were put online a day after they were written after testing of only a couple of hours. In three seconds 6,767 orders to buy light sweet crude oil futures were pumped into the New York Mercantile Exchange, roiling the futures market.
These are recent examples of the dangers of rapid-fire trading driven by complex software algorithms that can never be guaranteed as bug-free. In all three cases it is a fairly safe bet that management — in its infinite ignorance of software — ordered that systems be rushed into production rather than lose time and money testing, leading to colossal loses of money. That mentality hasn’t changed, which means it will happen again.
the good part
Electronic trading has brought down the cost… Read More »
October’s $106 billion supplemental funding request may be dead in the water in the House, but should $60 billion in assistance for Ukraine go forward, there is a threat which… Read More »
"I would take carried interest out and I would let people that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year pay tax, because right now they are paying very little tax and I think it's outrageous".
That was Donald Trump in 2015 when he hadn't quite become a Republican.
Carried interest is a preferential tax treatment that approximately cuts in half the taxes those who run the likes of hedge funds and private equity partnerships must pay. It is… Read More »
Republicans have long condemned Democrats for pushing through by simple majority vote, without a single Republican on board, the Affordable Care Act. How could they force on the nation a health care plan that affected one-sixth of the American economy.
Republicans are now employing the same maneuver — reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority — to ram through massive tax cut legislation that this time affects the entire U.S. economy, and for decades to come, without a single hearing,… Read More »
"It's not good for me, believe me", said Donald Trump about the tax plan developed by him and a group of six from the Senate, the House and his administration. From a president infamous for inventing his own reality, this claim dwarfs all that came before. When he said in January, "We are going to be cutting taxes massively", it turns out he meant his own.
what they meant by simplificationTo begin, the plan would eliminate the Alternative Minimum… Read More »
Donald Trump has hit upon a powerful campaign strategy no one else thought of. In his inconsistencies, his contradictory pronouncements, his saying one 
If we double the debt, we can just print money, like some countries.
thing one moment and denying it the next, people can fasten on whatever strikes a chord in them and discard the rest. "That's the real Donald Trump", they seem to say when they hear something that resonates in their life. "He doesn't really mean the other thing he said".
How else to explain their voting for a candidate who last fall said, "Our wages are too high", that they need to be lowered to… Read More »
About this time four years ago in the run-up to the 2012 elections, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek ran an article titled, "The GOP Heads Straight for the Laffer Curve", the notion that cutting
income taxes results in higher government revenues. Leaving money in the public pocket spurs investment, growth and higher taxable incomes that, despite reduced tax rates, throw off more income than the higher tax rates they replace and more than pay for themselves.
Lacking any conclusive proof that this is true, this brainstorm of economist Arthur Laffer has nonetheless become an unquestioned article of faith for Republicans, even though rejected by economists of all political persuasions. Laffer preaches economic gospel from his offices in Nashville and whom The New York Times dubbed "the Reagan era economist and godfather of supply-side economics". The experiment that Republicans wish to apply to nothing less than the entire budget and revenue streams of the United States was literally born on a cloth napkin over dinner at the Hotel Washington in DC in 1974. Laffer was demonstrating his idea at dinner with a couple of government types named Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, well before the ascendancy of either of them to the vice presidency for one, and chief of staff and defense secretary for the other.
So why has this notion that Democrats consider voodoo proved so durable? Without it, without the ability to claim that tax cuts bring in more revenue, not less, how could conservatives make a case for cutting taxes while simultaneously railing against the $18 trillion-plus national debt that the cuts would aggravate still further?
But in this campaign, the Republican candidates seem to have all but given up on this counter-intuitive exercise in magical thinking. They are instead competing with each other with tax cuts so deep that they can no longer pretend they are not adding trillions of dollars to the national debt.
A companion cardinal principle is that higher taxes reduce the incentive to work. You can just about make this out in Laffer's notes on the napkin ("We've been taxing taxing work, output and employment...") 
The original napkin, dedicated to Rumsfeld
"High tax rates stifle innovation, work, investment and American competitiveness", says Stephen Moore in the Weekly Standard", Bill Kristol's magazine. Cut taxes and people work harder, producing higher taxable income.
This is assuredly true in the extremes — at the 90% maximum tax rate of the Eisenhower years, top earners probably threw up their hands and said, why bother — but otherwise this smacks of standard economists' doctrine where if one line on the blackboard goes up, the other must come down, as if it were a Newtonian law of physics. This ignores the fact that we have no option other than to work to support ourselves and put our kids through college no matter whether tax rates rise or fall. Laffer seems to presume that we've been free to exercise discretion in whether or not to work hard in reaction to today's taxes rates, that in a kind of Pavlovian reaction, we will surge forward if taxes are cut with a burst of new-found energy and productivity, with the government making more money from our expanded effort.
An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal tells us, "A higher rate on the next dollar a worker earns discourages him from working more. The highest tax bracket is especially important as top earners produce the most and innovate the most". That questionable assertion is the rationale for cutting the tax rates for top earners, far and away the group that benefits the most from the reform proposals of all the candidates.
Jeb Bush would cut the top rate from 39.6% to 28%. He wants symbolically to match Reagan's 1981 cuts. So do Kasich and Christie . Trump would make the top rate 25%, as would Jindal. As a sort who probably haven't been near a form 1040 in years, all make a fetish of cutting the number of tax brackets from the current 7 to, usually, 3 — as if that's what make taxes complicated rather than the 74,000 page tax code that Carly Fiorina wants to cut to three pages.
Let's make it really simple with a single rate, say the others who have announced plans. They want a single "flat tax" rate for all: 20% for Santorum, 15% for Carson, 14.5% for Paul, 10% for Cruz. Huckabee would do away with income taxes altogether, substituting a 23% national sales tax. All would cut corporate rates from the current 35% to as little as 0% (Jindal).
It's easy to see that the Laffer Curve can't come to the rescue, and why none of the candidates is making much of an attempt to pretend that these steep tax cuts will lead to such growth that tax receipts will soar beyond the lost revenue of the cuts. Instead they are counting on a new gimmick in budget forecasting called "dynamic scoring" to somewhat ameliorate the runaway debt their plans produce. The argument is that if taxes are cut, growth will follow and it's only fair that forecasting should factor that in, even though there is nothing consistent in past experience to go on, and the amount of growth to plug in is whatever you hit on the dartboard.
So while the Tax Foundation says Jeb Bush's plan would produce a $3.6 added deficit over 10 years, he says that growth would back that down to $1.6 trillion. We don't see Santorum's true shortfall, because he cites an imagined net of $1.1 trillion "after increased growth and job creation" (and even that will be wiped clean with his cancelling Obamacare and its costs). Ted Cruz does the same, ducking the raw revenue loss of his 10% flat tax and assuming less than $1 trillion "with dynamic scoring" when, clearly, a universal tax rate so low would lead to government hemorrhaging. The only candidates not playing this game seem to be Jindal's, whose flat tax would result in a $9 trillion 10-year deficit — a 22% drop in government revenues — and Trump's plan which leads to a $10 trillion drop.
Even Marco Rubio, who went counter to the rest with a top tax rate of 35%, would run up a $4 trillion debt because of doing away with all taxes on capital gains and dividends and advancing a costly social program of child tax deductions.
As should be clear, the deeply reduced tax rates of the other candidates leaves the government with huge revenue losses so that the trillions can be transferred largely to their patrons in the top income class.
but it's doctrineThe candidates may not be able to make extravagant Laffer Curve claims, but the indoctrinated still carry on. Republicans cite what followed the Reagan tax cuts as incontrovertible proof that reduced taxes produce the growth that brings in higher tax receipts. It's a difficult case to make when the subject is the vast U.S. economy with so many other forces at play, but they need a mystical gospel to justify the tax cuts that attract votes. "When Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 28 % in the 1980s, the Laffer Curve effect was indisputable. The economy exploded, tax revenues nearly doubled over the decade", says Stephen Moore.
"Doubled" is an astonishingly dishonest claim because Moore used dollars unadjusted for inflation so he could compare 1980's $517 billion to 1990's $1,032 billion. This table, properly adjusted for inflation, proves him to be a charlatan (fiscal 1989 included as policy overlapping from Reagan's last year; similarly, 1980 really belongs to Carter): 
No surprise that revenue in fact fell for the first few years as a consequence of the tax cuts and to such a degree that the 1986 Tax Reform Act had to raise taxes because the government was in trouble, but Moore doesn't mention that.
Of Jeb Bush's "growth" plan The Wall Street Journal said in September, "The Reagan tax reform cut the top rate to 28% from 50% [sic]. That reform helped to sustain the 1980s economic boom and set the stage for growth through the 1990s". Thus does doctrine even claim that Reagan deserves the credit for Clinton's boom years.
What about the Bush tax cuts? Are they used to prove the Laffer Curve? Revenue rose (see table) but, "For the last four years tax receipts have consistently come in below expectations...revenue remains far lower than anyone would have predicted before the tax cuts began", wrote 
economist Paul Krugman in 2006. "In January 2001, before tax cuts were known, the budget office forecast $2.57 trillion in fiscal 2005. Even with the recent increase in receipts, the actual number will be at least $400 billion less.
What about now? Look at North Carolina, says Moore. In the 2012 election, Republicans took the governorship as well as control of the legislature. In 2013 they rapidly enacted tax cuts (and extreme voting right changes challenged by the Justice Department) that dropped the personal and corporate rates by a quarter. According to Moore, the state budget office says that, despite tax cuts, revenue increased by 6%, a Laffer triumph it would seem, but we've seen how Moore fudges data.
The state cut unemployment benefits to the lowest in the nation: from $535 weekly to $350 with no extensions beyond the minimum 20 weeks, the shortest in the country. Moore calls this "tough love" and says that owing to the peaceful, weekly Moral Monday demonstrations (this writer lives in North Carolina), "the state boiled over with rancorous political rallies". The question, though, is whether the $2.8 billion saved by these cuts are being counted as revenue improperly attributed to the Laffer theory, which is tied only to tax cuts, not budget cuts.
what's the matter with kansasWhich brings us to Kansas. Laffer himself was behind the current engineering of the recent Kansas's experience. Governor Brownback set out to slash taxes; growth would more than make up the nominal reduction in government revenue. "We'll see how it works", said Brownback. "We'll have a real live experiment". The Republican legislature approved the various tax cuts in 2012 and 2013.
It did not go well. The radical tax cuts, with cuts in public services and a tax increase focused on lower income people, led to a $400 million budget, which in led this year to an embarrassing reversal, the largest tax hikes in Kansas history to cover the shortfall, passed by the legislature at 4AM one morning in May. "I think it's clear that the tax cuts were promoted as having these quick and strongly positive results, and they haven't", says Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review.
Proof of its efficacy lacking and derided by economists though it be, the perpetrators of the Laffer Curve are nevertheless enjoying the success of their napkin doodle tremendously. Laffer, Rumsfeld and Cheney met again for lunch last year, 40 years later, at the same hotel to reminisce. They even made this video to flaunt what has so successfully given cover to the unabashed conservative drive all these years to dissociate ever lower taxes with ever higher debt.
Cheney holds up Laffer's re-drawing at reunion lunch
In the standoff between Obama’s edict that the top tax rates must be increased to reduce the deficit versus Boehner & Co’s insistence that unspecified deductions and “loopholes” be reduced instead, taxes on capital gains and dividends have been a comparative afterthought, even though their special rates cost the government $91 billion a year according to Bloomberg.
Instead of a tax rate that could then go as high as 39.6%, the Clinton administration reduced the rate on capital gains to 20% and President Bush cut further to a flat 15% for both capital gains and dividends. We have since seen a pronounced widening of the disequilibrium between those at the top of the income scale and everyone else. How else other than these sharply lower rates can one explain why a stunning 93% of income growth went entirely to the top 1% in the first two years of what for everyone else has been a snail’s pace recovery.
The President has proposed that capital gains taxes be restored from today’s 15% to the 20% of the Clinton years and that dividends be taxed the same as ordinary income — that is, as highly as the 39.6% rate he hopes to reinstate for top earners. But if true tax simplification and reform is the objective, we ask: what should tax policy be?
First comes fairness. Taxpayers are rewarded with the 15% rate because investment in the securities of corporate America is what creates jobs and makes the economy grow. So… Read More »
Politicians have found this message useful for whipping up a crowd's outrage at the injustice of the tax system, and there's a good chance it's been one of those anonymous screeds that has arrived in your e-mail inbox at some point. It's a claim that's been around at least since John McCain said it during the 2008 campaign (when it was 40%, before the economic downturn destroyed still more income), and there it was again on the very first day of Rick Perry's presidential campaign when he said in his speech, "we're dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don't even pay any income tax".
True. But the injustice is the other way 'round. First, 47% do not pay income tax because they make too little income, and that's according to the rates put in place by fellow Texan George W. Bush, so there's not a little irony to the governor's complaint. Taxes are due on virtually every dollar of every American's taxable income (click 'Read More' to see table), so no one should assume reading the 47% claim that there are income groups that go Scot free. But after the standard deduction, exemptions and application… Read More »