doublegunshop.com - home Forums Ken Burn's Teddy R.

Heck, I'll be a clown.

You mentioned there's dispute among economists about the effectiveness of Reagan's policy. To have a few lefties out of some lib university poop on a Republican is no great revelation.

I believe overall tax revenue did increase under Reagan, but it was not from dumb luck or squeezing more money from the exact same amount of tax payers. The tax base was significantly increased, you contend only by code, but never the less more were contributing.

No doubt in my mind, the tax base was significantly increased by putting nonworking citizens from the carter years, back to work and then some.

I believe policy accounts for the overall revenue increase in a growth and productive manner, not by a strategy the squeezes more from less folks, and forcing personal and corporate assets to stay on the sidelines.

I have not tried to make any point about Reagan's economic policies. Some of you have a tendency to impute motives to other posters and to draw conclusions that were never stated nor implied. My point was that Reagan reduced tax rates, but did not reduce taxes. That is all. Back to your cartoons now.

Well, then we're in agreement. Although it was a very convoluted journey to reach it. It appeared to me that this was a debate between broad economic concepts, while in fact it was a debate over minor aspects. You're obviously an anti-cartoon bigot.

Quick! some of you guys post some cartoons now!

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=hot+...electedIndex=52

I can see once again Replacment has gone off the deep end-just as he has done before with Reagan TAX CUTS (yes they were indeed CUT Replacment),he seem to think he know more then virtually every economist about the cuts.

Perhaps Art Laffer does not know nearly as much as "Replacement" (in Replacements mind)but I am going to go out on a limb and just go with Laffer and maybe-again I doubt it thou, it will get through his head that the increased tax revenue was not caused by raising taxes,in fact it was the opposite ! ;

Washington � � The bulk of U.S. tax cuts began on Jan. 1, 1983, and the economic recovery began at the same time. Isn�t it amazing how tax reductions do not work until they take effect?

More to the point, the downturn of 1981 and 1982 as foreseen by many a supply-side economist was actually the consequence of the delayed reductions in tax.

In the year before a tax cut, most people do everything that they can to postpone realizing income from the higher-taxed year in order to defer its recognition until the lower-taxed year commences.

By all accounts, the recovery of 1983 and 1984 was spectacular. Real gross national product, which measures the total value of goods and services, including income from foreign investments, grew in those two years at an average annual rate of some 6 percent.

Notwithstanding the masses of data and commentary emanating from the White House and the Republican Party during 1984 and beyond, some people still have not comprehended the magnitude of the effects of tax cuts.

Perhaps most surprising to traditionalists is the fact that inflation has fallen during this period of nascent and actual tax cuts.

To supply-siders and the electorate, this result seems quite rational. Just as a bumper crop of apples leads to lower apple prices, so an aggregate supply increase leads to a lower inflation rate.

In the period from 1981 to 1983, consumer price inflation fell to 3.2 percent from 10.4 percent.

http://www.laffercenter.com/reaganomics-tax-cuts-alone-are-not-enough/

In particular, supply-side economics has focused primarily on lowering marginal tax rates with the purpose of increasing the after-tax rate of return from work and investment, which result in increases in supply.

Yet in the roughly 30 years from the 1980s through the first decade of the new century, supply-side ideas contributed to the longest boom in United States history and an incredible transformation of the world economy. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1982-1999 was one continuous mega-economic expansion. In fact, as it stretched into 2007, this 25 Year Boom saw a tripling in the net wealth of U.S. households and businesses from $20 trillion in 1981 to $60 trillion by 2007. When adjusted for inflation, more wealth was created in this 25 year boom than in the previous 200 years.

DaveK, once again your post is mostly irrelevant to the question at hand. No one disputes that there was an economic recovery during the Reagan years. The issue is whether he cut taxes or cut tax rates. Get back on point.

I can't resist King's admonishment to "leave Paul Krugman out of it". Krugman is merely another one of those Keynesian, Statist, Religious sociopathic ideologues who masquerade as an economist. Here is an excerpt by Martin Hutchinson as a response regarding Krugman's comments upon the death of Margaret Thatcher. His attempts at revisionism are preposterous. I think it's relevant to the thread.

As the top Keynesian gadfly, Paul Krugman's recent attack on Margaret Thatcher wasn't very surprising.

In a blog post on the very day she passed, he questioned whether or not Margaret Thatcher had actually made any difference to the performance of the British economy.

Since she had spent much of her career fighting the theories of like-minded economists you can easily understand why Krugman was so quick to take a swing.

But as someone who was actually there, I can tell you the evidence of Thatcher's success is incontrovertible-no matter what Paul Krugman wants you to believe.

What's more, the larger truth is that Thatcher's principles still hold lessons for us today.


The Real Thatcher Record

To illustrate the difficulty of Thatcher's battle: In the summer of 1981, no fewer than 364 top economists wrote a letter to the London Times denouncing her policies and saying they would inevitably lead to economic decline.

That letter marked just about the absolute low point of the 1979-81 recession.

After its publication the economy reverted into strong growth, and in the following year Thatcher's Falklands victory assured her re-election.

From 1981, Britain's economy continued to strengthen with only minor recessions until 2007. The trends marked a complete break from what had gone before, leading British living standards from 10% below those of France in 1980 to 10% above them in 2007.

You'd think the 364 economists who had written the foolish letter would have had difficulty keeping employment once the trend took hold. But far from it.

For the last 10 years, one of them, Mervyn King, has been Governor of the Bank of England -- which explains a lot about the failings of British monetary and regulatory policy, both before and since the 2008 financial crash.

Where Krugman's Argument Falls Apart

Of course, economic realities are hard to prove. Even 30 years after the event, a clever casuist like Krugman can manipulate figures to throw doubt on Thatcher's extraordinary turnaround in the British economy.

Krugman's argument looks at British living standards compared with the French, and produces a second very confusing graph of British unemployment (which was very high during Thatcher's early years because of all the dead capacity that had to be weeded out - the effect was much like the opening up of the Soviet Union after 1991) and then claims that the trend does not become clear until the mid-1990s, so Thatcher had nothing to do with it.

That ignores the political realities. There was no significant policy change in Britain after Thatcher's 1990 departure, other than the 1992 reversal of the foolish 1990 decision to link the pound to the deutschemark. John Major, Thatcher's successor, was a feeble individual with none of her convictions or courage, but he did not reverse her policies since his voting base would not have stood for it.

The 1990s strength after the 1990-92 hiccup (which only confirmed a trend already visible in 1981-89) was as much due to Thatcher as if she had still been wielding her handbag in Downing Street.

It was only after the massive Conservative party defeat in the 1997 election that policy changed, and then only gradually.

Tony Blair, the Labor leader, was quite willing to build on Thatcher's achievements, although over time the sloppy expansion of public spending by his Chancellor of the Exchequer and eventual (2007) successor Gordon Brown did change the policy trajectory.

Again, unlike Paul Krugman, I was there.

I returned to England from New York in late 1982, after Thatcher's Falklands victory had made her re-election inevitable, and lived there until 1995 (by which time a Labor government was itself inevitable).

The effects of Thatcher's policies were already apparent by the time of her 1983 re-election, and they were crystal-clear to everyone by the time of her second re-election in 1987. (Then the snarling opposition could only growl about "bourgeois triumphalism" - an insult I was happy to acknowledge!)

Yet even now in 2013 Krugman tries to explain them away. It is one of the annoyances of economics compared to the hard sciences, that there is always someone willing to doubt experimental results, however emphatic!

Of course, the current overspending, money madness and debt accumulation will eventually lead the United States to a position not unlike that of Britain in the late 1970s, with high inflation, high unemployment, and a mass of useless malinvestment that has to be liquidated for growth to resume.

However, I'm confident that we will then find leaders who know how to restore our economy and are capable of doing it.

But like Margaret Thatcher, they will have to engage in a titanic struggle against huge entrenched opposition, not least of which will come from economists like Krugman who have justified the current erroneous policies.

No, that is not the issue. He cut individual and corporate taxes, which resulted in investment, innovation, job growth, and increased consumer spending. As a result, more people were paying taxes, and also making more money. That doesn't mean he took more tax money from YOU, it means he created more tax payers in each income bracket. It's a pretty disingenuous argument to allege that the result was an increase in taxes. It's not hard to understand unless you are simply pursuing a different agenda which relies on intellectual dishonesty. That appears to be your intent. Splitting hairs for a dishonest purpose.

Sorry to steer this one back sort of on topic. I've been noticing h.r. 5606 by dem rep honda out of kalifornia. He wants to subject home builders to the same regs as manufacturers. Two interesting points to me, it has an unstipulated 'and for other purposes'. Second, it fits really well with the lame duck regulatory approach, if it dies on the obsolete legislative path.

Quick question to Bill, do these political views parallel your own in your present circumstance. I couldn't help but wonder if all home smiths will be regulated because of 'political views'. Ahh, no big deal, they must be thinking about just bad guys.

You're off on another tack, Ken. I said leave Krugman out of it, look at the Reagan numbers. For confirmation it's all a punk's game that ignorance plays in to, look at how Democrat and GOP rhetoric matches lower taxes and smaller government.

Craig, I can't tell just what your last post is saying. I don't know anything about the reference to California. My point about Teddy Roosevelt was just to say that, like him, I believe our politics and economy are under the thumb of an out-of control group of wealthy individuals and big corporations. Democracy has been high-jacked. I try to say here quite exactly what I mean, but you often seem to impute ideas to me that I don't hold and never stated. You seem to have taken the passage above entirely out of context though I'm sure you meant no offence.