President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Take Steve Mnuchin's BS out of it. ... and the Laffer Curve itself actually makes quite a bit of sense. It's unfair to sum up the Laffer Curve based on the way it gets mangled by politicians (and by Art Laffer himself, unfortunately). The problems with the curve are 1) That it is too simplistic, and 2) Art Laffer himself perverted his own work, making politicized conclusions about tax cuts that have nothing to do with the basic curve, which is a common sense relationship. 3) The curve just looks at tax rates in a vacuum. It does not account for spending -- and nobody ever touches the spending side of the equation when invoking the Laffer curve. In fact, we increased spending at the same time we cut taxes.

The Laffer Curve itself? It just states something obvious. The more you tax people, the more incentive you create for them not to work. It's that simple. And it should be common sense. At 100 percent taxes, people won't work at all -- unless the place becomes Greece, and people avoid paying taxes by any means necessary.

Applying that to legislation that taxes people isn't easy -- except for people like Mnuchin, using dubious claims to make the case for a tax cuts. For one thing, not everyone is taxed at the same rate, with the tax system we have. So you can't plot out revenues based on tax rates in any scientific way. It's more complicated than the basic curve, and there are too many variables in our messy tax code. Secondly, the notion that tax cuts create jobs isn't true, in a simplistic way. Give a company a boon from a tax cut, and first, in a stagnant economy, they are most likely to just pay out a huge dividend to the owners of the company and not hire anyone. Which is what we are seeing now. Third, as I said, if you drive up spending and cut taxes, it is not going to be a formula for more revenue. Use common sense. And last to the extent companies do try to grow when they are taxed less, technology is allowing productivity gains that exceed what humans are capable of. So instead of jobs ,you are just as likely to see purchases of robots and computers, which is exactly what we are seeing.