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In a free market economy, the law of supply and demand, rather than a central government, regulates production and labor. Companies sell goods and services at the highest price consumers are willing to pay, while workers demand the highest wages companies are willing to pay for their services. A purely capitalist economy is a free market economy; the profit motive drives all commerce and forces businesses to operate as efficiently as possible to avoid losing market share to competitors.

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As you can see, expanded child credits don’t have any positive impact on growth for the simple reason that they don’t alter incentives to work, save, or invest (they may be desirable for other reasons, however). Lower marginal tax rates lead to some added growth, particularly if the top rate is reduced since upper-income taxpayers have far greater control of the timing, level, and composition of their income. But the biggest growth effects come from lowering the corporate tax rate and reducing the tax code’s bias against new investment.

https://i2.wp.com/freedomandprosperi...Cut-Growth.jpg

Now let’s take the next step.

If changes in tax policy lead to increases in economic output, that also means a greater amount of taxable income.

So the Tax Foundation also can tell us the degree to which the aforementioned tax cuts will change revenue after 10 years. As you can see, most tax cuts result in less revenue, but in some cases there’s a considerable amount of revenue feedback. And if policy makers shift toward expensing, the long-run effect is more tax revenue.

https://i2.wp.com/freedomandprosperi...ut-Revenue.jpg

Now let’s look from the other perspective.

What happens to the economy if various tax hikes are imposed?

As you can see, some tax increases have relatively modest effects on economic output while others significantly discourage productive behavior.

https://i0.wp.com/freedomandprosperi...ike-Growth.jpg

And when you feed the growth effects back into the model, you then can see the likely real-world effect of those tax increases on tax revenue.

So if policy makers impose a relatively benign tax hike, such as scaling back the state and local tax deduction, they will collect a considerable amount of revenue. But if they increase top tax rates on personal income or corporate income, a lot of the projected revenue evaporates. And if they exacerbate the tax bias against new investment, the net effect is less revenue.

https://i1.wp.com/freedomandprosperi...ke-Revenue.jpg

By the way, these charts show why the class-warfare tax policies of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are so misguided. The amount of economic damage per dollar collected would be ridiculous.

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As much as I enjoy most of the messages from readers, there is no way that I can answer more than a small fraction of them. The messages I don’t reply to at all are those from obviously ignorant people who offer insults instead of arguments. However, a recent column has brought forth more than the usual number of uninformed denunciations, so it may be useful to other readers to explain why they should not take such nonsense seriously when they encounter it.

What I said that set off the crazies was that there is no such thing as “trickle-down” economics. Supposedly those who believe in trickle-down economics want to give benefits to the rich, on the assumption that these benefits will trickle down to the poor.

As someone who spent the first decade of his career researching, teaching and writing about the history of economic thought, I can say that no economist of the past two centuries had any such theory.

Some of those who denounced me for saying that there was no trickle-down theory cited an article by David Stockman years ago — as if David Stockman was the last word, and I should forget everything I learned in years of research because David Stockman said otherwise.

What is often confused with a trickle-down theory is supply-side economics, such as that advocated by Arthur Laffer. That theory is that tax cuts can generate more tax revenue for the government because it changes people’s behavior, causing more economic activity to take place, leading to more taxable income, as well as a faster growing economy.

It is not hard to find examples of when this happened — for example, during the Kennedy administration, among other times and places.

Whether it will happen in a given set of circumstances is what is controversial, but none of this has anything to do with money trickling down from the rich to the poor. It has to do with the creation of more wealth in the economy as a whole.

The notion of a trickle-down theory is debunked on pages 388-389 of my book “Basic Economics” (2nd edition). But most of those who went ballistic over my denial of a trickle-down theory were not seeking further information.

As far as they were concerned, they already had the absolute truth and only needed to vent their anger over my having dared to say otherwise. That is a sign of a much more general and much more dangerous trend in our society today that goes far beyond a handful of true believers foaming at the mouth against one columnist.

If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think — that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely what our schools and colleges are failing to teach today.

It is worse than that. Too many teachers, from the elementary schools to the graduate schools, see their role as indoctrinating students with what these teachers regard as the right beliefs and opinions. Usually that means the left’s beliefs and opinions.

The merits or demerits of those ideas is far less important than whether or not students learn to analyze and weigh those merits and demerits. Educators used to say, “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.”

Today, students can spend years in educational institutions, discussing all sorts of issues, without ever having heard a coherent statement of the other side of those issues that differ from what their politically correct teachers say.

There are students in our most prestigious law schools who have never heard arguments for the social importance of property rights — not just for those fortunate enough to own property, but for those who don’t own a square inch of real estate or a single share of stock. How they would view the issues if they did is a moot point because they have heard only one side of the issue.

People who go through life never having heard the other side of issues ranging from environmentalism to minimum wage laws are nevertheless emboldened to lash out in ignorance at anyone who disturbs their vision of the world. The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools.

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New York's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, in his inaugural speech, denounced people "on the far right" who "continue to preach the virtue of trickle-down economics." According to Mayor de Blasio, "They believe that the way to move forward is to give more to the most fortunate, and that somehow the benefits will work their way down to everyone else."

If there is ever a contest for the biggest lie in politics, this one should be a top contender.

While there have been all too many lies told in politics, most have some little tiny fraction of truth in them, to make them seem plausible. But the "trickle-down" lie is 100 percent lie.

It should win the contest both because of its purity -- no contaminating speck of truth -- and because of how many people have repeated it over the years, without any evidence being asked for or given.

Years ago, this column challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this "trickle-down" theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a "trickle-down" policy. But they could never name that somebody else and quote them.

Mayor de Blasio is by no means the first politician to denounce this non-existent theory. Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called "an economic philosophy" which "says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else." Let's do something completely unexpected: Let's stop and think. Why would anyone advocate that we "give" something to A in hopes that it would trickle down to B? Why in the world would any sane person not give it to B and cut out the middleman? But all this is moot, because there was no trickle-down theory about giving something to anybody in the first place.

The "trickle-down" theory cannot be found in even the most voluminous scholarly studies of economic theories -- including J.A. Schumpeter's monumental "History of Economic Analysis," more than a thousand pages long and printed in very small type.

It is not just in politics that the non-existent "trickle-down" theory is found. It has been attacked in the New York Times, in the Washington Post and by professors at prestigious American universities -- and even as far away as India. Yet none of those who denounce a "trickle-down" theory can quote anybody who actually advocated it.

The book "Winner-Take-All Politics" refers to "the 'trickle-down' scenario that advocates of helping the have-it-alls with tax cuts and other goodies constantly trot out." But no one who actually trotted out any such scenario was cited, much less quoted.

One of the things that provoke the left into bringing out the "trickle-down" bogeyman is any suggestion that there are limits to how high they can push tax rates on people with high incomes, without causing repercussions that hurt the economy as a whole. But, contrary to Mayor de Blasio, this is not a view confined to people on the "far right." Such liberal icons as Presidents John F. Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson likewise argued that tax rates can be so high that they have an adverse effect on the economy.

In his 1919 address to Congress, Woodrow Wilson warned that, at some point, "high rates of income and profits taxes discourage energy, remove the incentive to new enterprise, encourage extravagant expenditures, and produce industrial stagnation with consequent unemployment and other attendant evils."

In a 1962 address to Congress, John F. Kennedy said, "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."

This was not a new idea. John Maynard Keynes said, back in 1933, that "taxation may be so high as to defeat its object," that in the long run, a reduction of the tax rate "will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget." And Keynes was not on "the far right" either.

The time is long overdue for people to ask themselves why it is necessary for those on the left to make up a lie if what they believe in is true.

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