Caninope wrote:Tahar Joblis wrote:As described in "The Triumph of Politics," by David Stockman, who was Reagan's "wunderkind" economic advisor, Reagan's economic policy boiled down to "yank government services and cut taxes." The idea was to shrink government. This neither actually happened, as Reagan rubber-stamped anything related to "security" and didn't have the political capital to touch Medicare or Social Security (resulting in no net reductions in government spending), and the abuse of the Laffer curve carried out by his budget team proved empirically incorrect when revenue time rolled around.
Which is why there was an increasing tax revenue as a % of the GDP during Reagan's term. I would say that the initial drop came from a combination of recession and of the implementation of the Kemp Roth tax cuts, which were soon supplemented by other tax changes. A Joint Economic Council of the House in '96 condoned the ERTA as beneficial to growth, at least in that decade. I'm not an economist though, and I don't feel like arguing, but go ahead and post your argument, anyways. It's always good to listen to other sides. Might learn something.
Inflation and natural population growth, tax revenue always increases no matter what congress does with its rate the previous year.
