Sidney Blumenthal Quotes

I am a supply sider. If you cut the right taxes, you will make more money.

Well, I think the reality is that as you study - when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth. They expanded the economy. They expand tax revenues.

Arthur Laffer's idea, that lowering taxes could increase revenues, was logically correct. If tax rates are high enough, then people will go to such lengths to avoid them that cutting taxes can increase revenues. What he was wrong about was in thinking that income tax rates were already so high in the 1970s that cutting them would raise revenues.

The linkage between tax rates and public services is, if not non-existent, negative.

If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough.

It is time to recognize a simple fact of life. Contrary to what some of my colleagues seem to believe, tax cuts do not pay for themselves.

You don't get an economy growing by raising taxes.

Tax cuts are like sex: When they are good, they are very, very good. And when they are bad, they are still pretty good.

Taken to its logical extreme, the Laffer curve makes no sense because, if you lower your taxes to zero, how are you going to get higher revenues? In practice, every government that toyed with this theory ended up with larger deficits, higher interest rates and greater social inequality.

The story of how the Laffer Curve got its name begins with a 1978 article by Jude Wanniski in 'The Public Interest' entitled, 'Taxes, Revenues, and the Laffer Curve.'

Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.

I used the so-called Laffer Curve all the time in my classes and with anyone else who would listen to me to illustrate the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues.

It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory.

Here's the problem if you keep raising tax rates: You slow down economic growth.

Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output.

Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase.

After 2003, we lowered taxes across the board. And by 2004, revenue to the federal government grew. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically. And by the end of the decade, revenue coming in the federal government had doubled.

We rule out raising taxes this year.

Well, certainly the Democrats have been arguing to raise the capital gains tax on all Americans. Obama says he wants to do that. That would slow down economic growth. It's not necessarily helpful to the economy. Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged.

You don't get gushers of revenue by raising tax rates. You get it through expansion.

The Irish move to a very low corporation tax has generated very significant revenue growth, considerably in excess of Britain's, where a slower economy has been combined with a number of stealth taxes.

Obviously a Conservative government will always leave taxes lower than they have been under Labour. Those things go with the territory of the Conservative Party.

The income tax is flawed for a number of reasons - it discourages economic growth and encourages a bloated government.

When I became governor, spending actually increased 28 percent my first term. Revenue increased 42 percent my first term without raising anybody's taxes. We did it because we had more taxpayers with more taxable income. That's how you get the revenue up. We did that without raising anybody's taxes.

The real reason to oppose increasing tax rates on the wealthy is that it's a good bet they could do more to help the economy if they keep their money rather than have their earnings confiscated by the government and spent on another round of stimulus.