Tax Cuts Bring Economic Growth — Not!

Steven Strauss
HuffPost
Posted: 10/25/11 04:56 PM ET

It has been something of an article of faith among conservatives that the solution to America's problems is in smaller government and lower tax rates. The argument on taxes goes something like: 'We need to unleash the wealth creators, who stimulated by the prospect of more income (due to lower tax rates), will create wealth for all of us.' And, that any tax increase -- for even the wealthiest taxpayers -- would have catastrophic consequences.

Actually the post World War II American economy provides a nice empirical test of this hypothesis -- the maximum marginal income tax rate gradually declined from about 90% to about 35%. Shouldn't this decline have lead to an explosion of economic growth as our wealth creators were unleashed? Sorry, Sarah Palin... it didn't.

During the ultra high tax 1950s (top marginal income tax rate of 90%), the United States had some of its best real economic growth (over 4%/year). And, for the decade where we had our lowest marginal income tax rates -- we had our worst real economic growth (about 1.5%/year). (See Table 1 below.)

So what happened? Well, first of all (Spoiler Alert! The following will upset ideologues!), the real world is complicated. Taxes are one part of the American economy, but by no means the only driver of our decision making process. People are motivated by lots of things -- not just money. In all the recent discussions about Steve Jobs, I can't recall a single quote, anecdote or story that suggested income tax rates had any influence on Steve Jobs' behavior. Does anyone really believe that if US income tax rates had been slightly higher Bill Gates would have founded Microsoft in Singapore (or some other low tax center)? As another example -- Warren Buffet, who has been an active investor from the 1950s to today, certainly could have moved offshore when tax rates were higher. He didn't.

(More here.)