Tax Reform

With possible tax reform looming, hopes are growing for real economic growth. It has happened before. Lower taxes pumping money through the system and driving growth.

The popular example is the Reagan Tax Reform in the 1980’s. There’s a real good case for something similar working, but we have to keep in mind that the baby boomers were hitting their peak spending years then and that played a big role in the growth that we saw. We may have some similar forces impacting things now as we’ve spent a lot of time shaking off past excess in the economy and slugging through a long period of very slow growth. Maybe we are lean and poised for growth.

I’ll take a tax reform effort at kick starting things.

Todd Kmiec

https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddkmiec/

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on October 5, 2017 at 5:08pm: Thanks, Todd.

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Corp Taxes

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/would-cutting-corporate-tax-rates-really-grow-the-economy/504845/

Unfortunately, lowering corp taxes DOES NOT create jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/corporate-tax-cuts-jobs....

Our report analyzes the 92 publicly held American corporations that reported a profit in the United States every year from 2008 through 2015 and paid less than 20 percent of their earnings in federal income tax.

If claims about the job-creation benefits of lower tax rates had any validity, these 92 consistently profitable firms would be among the nation’s strongest job creators. Instead, we found just the opposite.

The companies we reviewed had a median job-growth rate over the past nine years of nearly negative 1 percent, compared with 6 percent for the private sector as a whole. Of those 92 companies, 48 got rid of a combined total of 483,000 jobs.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/theres-little-evidence-that-cutting-corporate-taxes-creates-jobs.html

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Individual Taxes...

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/30/452905475/fact-check-do-tax-cuts-grow-the-economy

According to a 2012 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (referenced by the New York Times' David Leonhardt in a 2012 column), top marginal tax rates and economic growth have not appeared correlated over the past 60 years.