U.S. Budget and Economy

At the end of my November 8th post , I asked for anyone who knows of an economic study that purports to show that any income tax cut has paid for itself to please post a link to it. On November 18th, I received the following reply: I'm not an economist of any flavor, but I was wondering what you thought of the article by Stephen J Entin from the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation that I've linked below. He appears to argue that increased capital gains tax should decrease net federal revenues. Any thoughts appreciated. http://iret.org/pub/CapitalGains-1.pdf The rest of this post will attempt to answer this reply: My request at the end of my November 8th post did refer to income tax cuts, not capital gains tax cuts and those are the primary focus of my analysis which I referenced there. The only involved analysis of capital gains tax cuts that I have done are in my prior posts, here , here , and here . Following is my chief conclusion from that relatively s...

On November 7th, David Stockman and Mike Pence appeared on This Week with Christiane Amanpour to debate tax cuts. David Stockman was a budget director for President Ronald Reagan and Mike Pence is a Congressman and has been the Chairman of the House Republican Conference for the past two years. A video of the tax cut debate can be found on the This Week website and a transcript can be found at this link . Following is an excerpt from that transcript: PENCE: Before we get -- look, David Stockman is, you know, he's a really famous guy and a thoughtful guy. I just disagree with him vehemently and I, frankly, have for about 30 years. David believes that every tax increase equals a revenue increase, but that's not true. Anybody who is familiar with the historical data from the IRS knows that raising income tax rates will likely actually reduce federal revenues. AMANPOUR: Let me ask David... PENCE: So if we raise taxes, the American people are very likely going to -- the top 1 pe...