David Leonhardt Quotes
Over the past 65 years changes in the top tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth.
This quotation was very important because the most important economic principle of Republican ideology since the 1960s has been that tax cuts will produce economic growth and the converse: that tax increases will stifle economic growth. For 50 years the Republican nostrum for all economic problems has been to increase growth by cutting taxes and opposing all tax increases. However Leonhardt studied the data and results since 1987 and found that the Republican doctrine had been wrong. Economic growth plummeted when we had the largest tax cuts in the George W. Bush years and the greatest growth spurts were following the 1990 George W. Bush tax increase and the 1993 Bill Clinton tax cuts. When the data became public some Republicans took the view that taxes were just one of the factors determining economic growth and have been overwhelmed by other factors. Some Democrats argue that if this were really believed by Republicans, they would have favored these other factors more so than tax cuts when in fact tax cuts are always their nostrum.
David Leonhardt, Journalist & Commentator, “Do Tax Cuts Lead to Economic Growth?”, New York Times, September 16, 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The traditional conservative tax principle has always been that low tax rates are needed to produce economic expansion and in general this had been so until Clinton and Rubin combined higher tax rates with great fiscal discipline of government spending and low interest rates, not only produced a great economic expansion but eliminated the Reagan deficit and left office with a huge projected surplus.
This is the most articulate historical statement of the modern conservative mantra regarding taxes. However, one change has taken place. The words “necessarily” and “often” tend to be left out of the more modern ideological statements. Mellon’s original statement has never really had any politicians or economists who disagreed. Politicians of all economic persuasions have generally accepted the Mellon statement but the extreme conservatives’ creed is that a lowering of taxes always produces more revenue and a tax increase will inevitably lead to greater tax revenue—a position which Mellon never took. Mellon however was very solicitous of the wealthy, felt the welfare of the nation depended on their prosperity, and was a strong advocate of what was later called ‘trickle down’ economics {628592}.
She was refuting the claim of many economic conservatives that cutting taxes will always produce economic growth. Actually, in many cases tax cuts do have that effect, but as the counter-example shows, not always and not under all conditions. The Kennedy tax cuts, for example, did produce economic growth.
David Leonhardt is an American journalist and columnist. Beginning April 30, 2020, he writes the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. As of October 2018, he also co-hosted a weekly Opinion podcast titled "The Argument", with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg.
