U.S. Budget and Economy

On April 18th, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled "Obama's Tax Evasion" . The editorial mentions the exchange about capital gains between Obama and Charlie Gibson in the prior day's Democratic debate (mentioned in my prior post ). It also includes a chart showing the maximum capital gains tax rate and capital gains realizations as a percent of GDP since 1962. I found this data online on the U.S. Treasury's website . The following chart is based on that data. The actual numbers and sources are at http://www.econdataus.com/cgtax05.html . The above chart appears to match the Wall Street Journal chart except that it contains additional data and goes from 1954 to 2005 (the Wall Street Journal chart goes from 1962 to 2007). The red and dark blue lines in the above chart match the dark blue and light blue lines in the Wall Street Journal chart. About it's chart, the editorial says the following: As the nearby chart shows, when the tax rate has r...

John McCain was the guest on the April 20th program of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. As can be seen in this transcript of the interview , McCain made the following statement about Barack Obama's suggestion that the capital gains tax rate be raised: And he obviously doesn’t understand the economy, because history shows every time you have cut capital gains taxes, revenues have increased, going back to Jack Kennedy. It's unclear why McCain mentions Jack Kennedy since, according to this table , there was no change in the capital gains tax rate between 1942 and 1967, four years after Kennedy's death. In any case, George Will expanded on this theme just about one minute into the shows's roundtable segment . Talking about questions that Obama was asked in the April 17th Democratic debate, he said: One was on capital gains where he conceded the premise of the question as he should because it's true that when you raise capital gains tax rates, you lower revenues...