Blog linking.

[elfs]

Back when Hillary Clinton described Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, a number of people pointed out that this was an unfair comparison. For example, Darth Vader once served in the military. [Paul Krugman, NYT]

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Compare Rudy Giuliani: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues." Contrast: ""Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts of the past six years haven't paid for themselves." [Justin Fox, Time Magazine]

Sounds like a character issue to me.

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Another Willand Mitt Romney quote: "There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution."

No, Mr. Romney. That's not what it says. What the constitution says (Article 6) is that no oaths of office shall ever be required of the government for elected officials. It says nothing about the press or the people requesting an explanation from those seeking high office, and in fact allowing people to request that is a matter of free speech and principle.

Comments

[tagryn]

Would the Jedi Order be considered "military"? They weren't part of the Republic government, but served as a kind of paramilitary religious order that the Chancellor could call upon for selected missions, but I also got the impression they were 'running their own game' in accord with, but independent of, the elected government. Like...Blackwater?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

By definition there must be a point above which increasing taxes would produce reduced, rather than increased, revenues. This is because we know that 0% and 100% taxes would both, in the long run, yield close to zero revenues, so the maximum revenues must be somewhere in between. Obviously, if the tax rate were above the "sweet spot," reducing taxes would increase revenues, and vice versa.

The issue isn't whether the Laffer Curve is real or not ... it's where we are on the curve right now. You, obviously, believe that we are below the sweet spot, and Giuliani believes that we are above. Can't you even acknowledge that the "sweet spot" exists?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Laffer's curve is nothing more than a bald restatement of standard Chicago models of elasticity. It doesn't exist in the real world, any more than there exists a model gas in a perfect vacuum. I'm much more fond of the Neo-Laffer Curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve#The_Neo-Laffer_Curve), myself, which claims to be representative of real data from the real world over a fifty year period.

More to the point (looking through the Wikipedia article now), the Laffer Curve posits a uniform tax rate. We don't have that. Until we do, talking about the Laffer curve remains in the rarified world of theory, and has little to no practical application. In the six years of the current administration, we have seen the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans continue to experience incredible growth in their personal portfolios while the rest of us have experienced mostly static-- and some of that due to changes in the tax codes.

The Laffer Curve as a model exists, but its application to the real world is dubious at best.