Taxes, taxes, taxes-raise or lower?

[Rich Weese]

I want to share something here. If there is still a question whether to raise or lower tax rates, please back it up with facts, or history, please.

This lesson will come in 3 parts.
Harding and Cololidge period

part 1 1920 1928
tax revenue of GDP 2% 3.9%(double)
unemployment 6.5% 3.1%
What caused it? Cut rates from 77% to 25%

1960 1968
tax revenue of GDP 2.6% 9%
unemployment 5.8% 3.9%
This was JFK time. Cut rates from 91 to 70%

1978 1986
GDP growth 0.9% 4.8%
tax revenue growth -2.6% 3.5%
Reagan slashed rates 25% across the board in 1981 and highest rate was 50%. He later lowered it to 28% top bracket.

3 examples from history. If we truly can learn from history, these examples should make it easy.

Why there is even a discussion on raising rates? It is really confusing to me.Rich

p.s. U.S. Budget Data for info

[J Scott]

Originally posted by Rich W:

If there is still a question whether to raise or lower tax rates, please back it up with facts, or history, please.

You haven't backed up anything with facts or history...in fact, you've provided essentially no useful information above. All you've done is to indicate that there *might* be a correlation between tax rates and unemployment.

But, while you may have given an indication of CORRELATION between the two, you've given absolutely no indication of a CAUSATION between the two (not saying it doesn't exist, but you haven't provided any reason to believe it does).

That's probably not what you wanted to hear (I assume you are trying to support a hypothesis that you'd like to be true), but those are the facts...

Here's another example to clarify:

I can provide plenty of data that indicates that from June through August of each year, the amount of ice cream eaten by kids increases. I can also provide plenty of data that indicates that from June through August of each year, the number of kids who die from swimming pool drownings increases.

Does that mean that eating more ice cream leads to increased risk of drowning in swimming pools? (let me know if the answer isn't obvious)

But, this is a great example of why it's so important that we improve the educational system in this country. When people don't understand these basic logical constructs, we have a problem that is much BIGGER and FAR-REACHING than just unemployment.