Hillary Clinton got a laugh out of the sycophants and toadies in the audience the other day when describing the economic advisors to Donald Trump. Trump, of course, released elements of his economic approach on Monday in a speech, so Hillary had to try to diminish its worth by demeaning those who had advised participated in its creation.
The laugh line was when she was listing the advisors by description (not by name) and included "six guys named Steve." As far as we knew, there actually are, among others of course, six guys advising Trump whose names are Steve, or something like that. So it was a funny line, at least if you are not named "Steve" and would have felt it offensive to be criticized for the quality and validity of your advice based on what your parents had named you.
I would suppose that, at this point, then, it is relevant to ask who Hillary's "Steves" are, at least who is advising her on economic issues. So it was a bit off-putting to look at the official listing of her advisors on this site, and discover that the only reference in the site, among the 28 people actually named, to the word "economics" was where a guy named Steve, er, Mike Vlacich, was shown as having a resume including a stint in the "New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development."
That's it. And for the record, New Hampshire does even not tax work income.
Laugh or no laugh, Hillary's speech was trying to make the point that Trump's plan, including a three-tiered set of income tax rates capped lower than today's rates, constituted "trickle-down economics", the Reagan-era concept that is sure to get a boo from Hillary sycophants and toadies because (A) it is associated with Ronald Reagan, and (B) because it actually worked.
The concept was not particularly arcane. Tax rates in 1980, when Reagan was elected, were so high that the economy was disastrous, having lost the economic motivation to create jobs. If that sounds like the eight years under Barack Obama, you're right, only add in a flood of regulations on business now that make it even worse to hire new employees.
Reagan muscled through a three-year tax cut program that lowered rates an aggregate 25% over the three years from 1982-84. The concept was simply that wage-earners, taxed a lot less, could spend their own money in the economy, and business owners, taxed a lot less, could afford to create the jobs that produced the products and services that those wage-earners could now more readily afford because the government had a smaller hand in our pockets.
It was called "trickle-down" derisively by the Democrats, who predicted doom and gloom for tax revenues, but its results were going to be easy to measure. If it actually worked, tax revenues would start to expand fairly quickly and fairly substantially.
And work they did. In 1980, all Federal taxes generated $517 billion in revenues. By 1990 this had risen to over $1 trillion. This constituted a 28% increase even in constant dollars. More importantly, the individual income tax revenues alone rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $467 billion in 1990, a 25% increase in constant dollars.
More curiously, the "top 1%" of wage earners were paying 18% of all income tax revenues when Reagan took office. By the time he left office in 1989, that figure had risen to 28% of all income tax receipts, meaning that the highest incomes were actually successful enough to be able to shoulder an additional 10% of the overall tax burden.
As I have written for many years, we all are aware that this massive increase in revenues did not prevent the government from going far deeper in debt. The Congress, run by Democrats, managed to spend well over a dollar for every additional dollar that Reagan's tax cuts produced and, as I wrote Monday, that's going to cause more borrowing.
But it had nothing to do with, and was in no way an outcome of, the tax cuts. The "trickle-down" cuts did their job -- the economy boomed and tax revenues skyrocketed.
Yet here we are today, and Hillary Clinton, operates with no apparent advisors on her team, named Steve or not, with an economic background to tell her that criticizing tax policy by calling it "rehashed trickle-down economics" is a historical mistake. Of course, she clearly, with her spending plan, does not think that continued increases in the Federal debt are a problem, which is, of course, a problem.
I keep saying that if you're going to propose something, at least show where it has worked before, and certainly don't be out there proposing ideas that have failed before.
But if you don't have anyone on your team willing to stare you in the face and say that you're dead wrong -- and Hillary's history of ash-tray flinging suggest that isn't happening any time soon -- you're going to listen to no one who knows what he's talking about.
Sounds like Donald Trump's "Steves" are better than Hillary's "Steves."
Maybe she ought to call one of his.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob
at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving
new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at
bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton
No comments:
Post a Comment