December 28, 2014
Many newspapers require that people writing columns carefully document the factual claims they make. The Washington Post is not in this category as readers of Steve Moore’s column touting the wisdom of the Laffer Curve must know. I won’t go into the details of the misrepresentations in the piece. Paul Krugman has done some of this work here, and PGL at Econospeak adds more.
I will just make a couple of quick additional points. First, no one ever disputed that high tax rates have a negative incentive effect on work and savings. The question is the size of this effect. The basic story of the Reagan era does not provide much reason to believe that this negative effect was large. Growth of employment was slower in the 1980s than in the 1970s, savings rates fell, and the investment share of GDP fell to its lowest levels in the post-war era. There are other factors that can explain all of these developments, but it is pretty hard to make a case that lower tax rates were a major elixir for growth when all the key variables that were supposed to be affected went in the wrong direction.
The second point is that timing is everything. Moore likes to have the world begin in 1982. This was the trough of the steepest downturn in the post-war era. Economies typically bounce back from steep downturns with steep upturns (not in the most recent one, because that was the result of a collapsed bubble). For this reason the recovery is primarily a measure of the severity of the downturn. The more honest way to measure an economy’s performance is comparing it to the prior business cycle peak.
By this measure, the 1980s had slower growth then high tax days of the 1970s and much worse growth than the higher tax days of the 1960s. The world looks a bit better if we start at 1982, but that is not a serious way to assess the Reagan performance.
This reminds me of a time when I was on a radio show with Moore. Then too he was touting the wonders of the Reagan boom. I pointed out that the 1970s had better growth than the 1980s and offered Moore a $100 bet on the topic. Moore accepted and then touted the 1982 to 1989 growth rate. When I pointed out that the 1980s began in 1980, Moore got upset.
Unfortunately for Moore and other Laffer-Reagan backers, the 1980s still begin in 1980.
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