11/11/2007
If tax-cut strategies don’t work, why are they so popular abroad?
BY STEPHEN MOORE - Wall Street Journal - November 9, 2007
[ Yat’s Editorial Statement…
I’ve said for years, we need to ABOLISH THE I.R.S. and simply go to a flat 10% tax for everyone and numerous DEMONRATS have argued that it wouldn’t work.
A personal friend of mine from the Marine Corps moved to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico when he exited the service in 1972 and has enjoyed not only dual citizenship since that time, but has also profited very nicely with a flat 10% tax.
Let’s see why the Demonrats say it won’t work… ]
“I was told, ‘We cannot do a flat tax. It is untested. It will not work. It will cause budget deficits,” Mr. Laar recalls. However, he believed it would work because of what he’d read about it in Milton Friedman’s classic, “Free to Choose.” And so, in 1994, Mr. Laar ignored the economic pundits and snapped into place a 23% flat tax. Estonia has since experienced one of the most rapid growth spurts of any nation in the world.
There’s a lesson here for our country — Revolutionary ideas in economics, especially if they don’t leverage the power of the state, are often resisted by the intellectual elite. Ronald Reagan discovered this in 1980 when he was ridiculed by the establishment for proposing cuts in marginal tax rates as a cure for the high inflation and economic malaise of the 1970s.
Here we are 27 years later–with 40 million more jobs and a nearly $50 trillion higher net worth–yet the left intelligentsia is still obsessed with discrediting supply-side economics. In recent weeks, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic and many other liberal publications have devoted great space and attention to attacking the entire theory that lower tax rates can increase incentives for investment, saving and work.
