New data from the IRS show that in 2007 the richest 400 taxpayers in America increased their incomes by 31 percent over the previous year, increased their share of total income in America, and paid an even lower effective tax rate than ever before.

Writing for Tax Analysts, David Cay Johnston finds that the average income of the richest 400 grew from $263.3 million in 2006 to $344.8 million in 2007. Meanwhile, their effective income tax rate fell from 17.17 percent in 2006 to 16.62 percent in 2007.

As usual, a major cause of the low effective tax rates is the preferential rate for capital gains and stock dividends, which are taxed at a top rate of 15 percent instead of the top rate of 35 percent that applies to other income for the very rich. Capital gains made up 66.3 percent of income for the top 400 in 2007, up from 62.8 percent in 2006.

The data seem to highlight the need to allow the Bush tax cuts, which cut the top rate for capital gains and stock dividends to 15 percent, to expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

The report released last week by Citizens for Tax Justice on the President's budget argued that Congress should at least allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the rich (which Obama defines as married couples with incomes above $250,000 and unmarrieds with income above $200,000) and should enact at least as many revenue-raisers as the President proposes.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice explores the tax proposals included in the federal budget outline that President Obama submitted to Congress on February 1. Like the budget he submitted last year, it is a vast improvement over the policies of the Bush years and continues to outline a progressive reform agenda.

But, also similar to last year, the President’s budget could be greatly improved with more aggressive policies to raise revenue. Over the coming decade, the President proposes to cut taxes by $3.5 trillion. We include in this figure the cost of extending most of the Bush tax cuts and relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) as well as additional tax cuts that President Obama proposes.

His budget would offset a portion of this cost with provisions that would raise $760 billion over a decade by limiting the benefits of itemized deductions for the wealthy, reforming the U.S. international tax system and enacting other reforms and loophole-closing measures.

The report concludes that the federal government should collect at least as much revenue as the President proposes in order to avoid larger budget deficits. There are two bare minimum requirements for Congress to achieve this. First, Congress must not extend any more of the Bush tax cuts than President Obama proposes to extend. Second, Congress must raise at least as much revenue as President Obama has proposed ($760 billion over ten years) through loophole-closers and new revenue measures.

Read the full report.

Late last year, CTJ published a report examining the lack of scrutiny directed toward tax expenditures, and the repeated promises to address this problem made by past Administrations.  Unfortunately, the President’s most recent budget proposal shows no signs of progress on this issue.  As CTJ points out in an op-ed in today’s Sacramento Bee: “for the second year in a row, the Obama administration has chosen [in its budget] to simply copy-and-paste the Bush administration’s language on this issue, complete with all the same promises about what will be done at some point over the ‘next few years.’”

Read the op-ed.

At a hearing before the House Budget Committee this past Tuesday, the OMB’s Chief Performance Officer, Jeffrey Zients, expressed his full support for the basic proposal laid out in a report by Citizens for Tax Justice last week – namely, that the multitude of spending programs buried within our nation’s tax code need to be reviewed.

During his questioning of Mr. Zients, Representative Lloyd Doggett said that he was “encouraged by the comments in the President’s budget that ‘programs will … not be measured in isolation, but assessed in the context of other programs that are serving the same population or meeting the same goals.’”  At the same time, however, Mr. Doggett explained that “I don’t see how you can evaluate … [for example] Pell grants, Perkins loans, and work study, without evaluating and comparing them with a rather substantial tax reduction … the higher education tax credit that I authored. … But I don’t see OMB doing anything on that.”

In response, Mr. Zients stated: “I totally agree with the horizontal approach, in that the tax expenditure side should be part of that along with the [spending] programs that we were talking about.  So, 100% agreement there.”  In addition, while admitting that tax expenditures had not yet been a focus during his brief tenure at OMB, Mr. Zients promised to make them a priority moving forward.

This statement from the OMB’s top performance official represents a major departure from the delays within the Executive Branch to which we’ve become accustomed.  Over sixteen years ago, the legislative history behind the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) made clear that Congress wanted the Executive Branch’s performance review efforts to include the evaluation of tax expenditures.  And for nearly fourteen years, the President’s budget has identified tax expenditure review as a “significant challenge” that should be addressed in the near future.

Both Mr. Zients and Mr. Doggett should be commended for recognizing the flaw in OMB’s narrow focus on only direct spending programs.  The omission of tax expenditures from review is hardly a small issue – in total, the federal government actually “spends” more via special tax breaks than it does through the entire discretionary spending budget.  Continuing to exclude these programs from review would cripple the ability of President Obama’s OMB to accurately gauge government performance.

For more detail on the need for tax expenditure review, the federal government’s past efforts toward creating a review system, and the potential issues associated with creating such a system, be sure to read the CTJ report: Judging Tax Expenditures.

Read ITEP's New Report: Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of Tax Systems in All 50 States

By an overwhelming margin, most states tax their middle- and low-income families far more heavily than the wealthy, according to a new study by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy (ITEP).

“In the coming months, lawmakers across the nation will be forced to make difficult decisions about budget-balancing tax changes—which makes it vital to understand who is hit hardest by state and local taxes right now,” said Matthew Gardner, lead author of the study, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States. “The harsh reality is that most states require their poor and middle-income taxpayers to pay the most taxes as a share of income.”

Nationwide, the study found that middle- and low-income non-elderly families pay much higher shares of their income in state and local taxes than do the very well-off:

-- The average state and local tax rate on the best-off one percent of families is 6.4 percent before accounting for the tax savings from federal itemized deductions. After the federal offset, the effective tax rate on the best off one percent is a mere 5.2 percent.

-- The average tax rate on families in the middle 20 percent of the income spectrum is 9.7 percent before the federal offset and 9.4 percent after—almost twice the effective rate that the richest people pay.

-- The average tax rate on the poorest 20 percent of families is the highest of all. At 10.9 percent, it is more than double the effective rate on the very wealthy.

“Fairness is in the eye of the beholder.” noted Gardner. “But virtually anyone would agree that this upside-down approach to state and local taxes is astonishingly inequitable.”

The “Terrible Ten” Most Regressive Tax Systems

Ten states—Washington, Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Alabama—are particularly regressive. These “Terrible Ten” states ask poor families—those in the bottom 20% of the income scale—to pay almost six times as much of their earnings in taxes as do the wealthy. Middle income families in these states pay up to three-and-a-half times as high a share of their income as the wealthiest families. “Virtually every state has a regressive tax system,” noted Gardner. “But these ten states stand out for the extraordinary degree to which they have shifted the cost of funding public investments to their very poorest residents.”

The report identifies several factors that make these states more regressive than others:

-- The most regressive states generally either do not levy an income tax, or levy the tax at a flat rate;

-- These states typically have an especially high reliance on regressive sales and excise taxes;

-- These states usually do not allow targeted low-income tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit; these tax credits are especially effective in reducing state tax unfairness.

“For lawmakers seeking to make their tax systems less unfair, there is an obvious strategy available,” noted Gardner. “Shifting state and local revenues away from sales and excise taxes, and towards the progressive personal income tax, will make tax systems fairer for low- and middle income families. Conversely, states that choose to balance their budgets by further increasing the general sales tax or cigarette taxes will make their tax systems even more unbalanced and unfair.”

Implications for State Budget Battles in 2010

“In the coming months, many states’ lawmakers will convene to deal with fiscal shortfalls even worse than those they faced last year,” Gardner said. “Lawmakers may choose to close these budget gaps in the same way that they have done all too often in the past—through regressive tax hikes. Or they may decide instead to ask wealthier families to pay tax rates more commensurate with their incomes. In either case, the path that states choose in the upcoming year will have a major impact on the wellbeing of their citizens—and on the fairness of state and local taxes.”

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice explains why it’s time for the federal government to finally follow through on its long-unfulfilled promise to evaluate the usefulness of special tax breaks.

Does the research and experimentation tax credit, for example, actually encourage research?  Or does it simply enrich high-tech firms?  Does the mortgage interest deduction increase homeownership, or does it only reward people who would have purchased homes anyway?  Shockingly, these types of fundamental policy questions have not been addressed in any type of systematic and transparent fashion by our government.

In total, the federal government spends over $1 trillion each year on programs it administers via the tax code – i.e. “tax expenditures.”  To put that in perspective, annual spending on tax expenditures is actually slightly larger than the entire discretionary spending budget (i.e. the portion of federal spending that Congress must approve each year).

The lack of scrutiny directed toward tax expenditures first gained attention in the late 1960’s when an official listing of tax expenditures was finally produced in an effort to highlight these programs’ size and importance.  In 1993, Congress indicated a desire to take this concept one step further by suggesting that the performance of tax expenditures be regularly reviewed.  Soon after this, the Executive Branch did make some slow progress toward reviewing tax expenditures before effectively abandoning the idea soon after the start of the Bush Administration.

CTJ's new report makes the case for resuming these efforts toward the creation of a tax expenditure review system.  Among the reasons for moving forward on this issue now are:

- Tax expenditures, whether measured as a share of GDP or as a share of income taxes, have increased immensely over the past twenty years.

- Restoring fiscal sustainability will be nearly impossible without a closer look at the more than $1 trillion spent annually via the tax code.

- Creating a new “cross-program” performance review framework, of the type advocated by President Obama, will require the review of tax expenditures.

- Tax expenditure review fits perfectly into President Obama’s agenda to improve government transparency.

- A new dataset, described by the OMB as permitting “more extensive, and better, analyses of many tax provisions” will become available in the very near future.

- State efforts on the tax expenditure review front have provided the federal government with some powerful lessons from which to draw in creating a review system.

Read the report.

Read the 2-page summary.

Read the summary of the report from a state-level perspective.

Click here to watch and listen to speeches made at CTJ's 30th anniversary celebration.

On Wednesday, October 21, Citizens for Tax Justice was joined by lawmakers, progressive advocates, policy experts and labor leaders in celebrating its thirty years of fighting for tax fairness. The speakers included four current and former members of Congress and two journalists who've covered tax issues extensively for several years.

The first to speak, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, told the crowd:

"CTJ is a voice for real fairness, for justice, in our tax system, a voice for those who believe in closing special-interest loopholes and enforcing compliance with the tax code. CTJ is there every day and every week, with detailed analysis of tax proposals, alternative ideas, and good suggestions.  Bob McIntyre, CTJ’s longtime and tireless leader, is one of its driving forces and a terrific public servant who has dedicated his life to tax justice. Washington would be a much poorer place and even more skewed to the powerful interests without Citizens for Tax Justice..."

Senator Levin went on to discuss the debate over financing health care reform. He called on his colleagues to consider the measure he and Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas have introduced (to crack down on tax havens) as a way to help pay for health care reform, and he also argued in favor of a surtax on high-income taxpayers.

"As we contemplate health-care reform, Congress needs to decide whether to put ourselves in a straight-jacket when it comes to revenues – and risk that health coverage remains unaffordable for many middle-class Americans. Or, will we do the right thing when it comes to taxes and healthcare, close some of these loopholes that allow people, for instance, to stash assets overseas or avoid taxes on massive investment earnings, and use the revenue to provide long overdue and badly needed health-care reform? Will we leave middle-class families locked out of affordable coverage while we refuse to consider a 'millionaire’s tax' on our wealthiest citizens?"

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon discussed how roughly 10,000 tax breaks have been added to the tax code since the 1986 tax reform that swept away most loopholes. He spoke of the book Showdown at Gucci Gulch, which chronicles the battle over the 1986 tax reform, and said that CTJ director Bob McIntyre was the "sheriff" of that story.

"Twenty years ago," Wyden said, "after Bob got in there and cleaned up Dodge, Bill Bradley and Ronald Reagan came together and got all the credit." But for the next round of tax reform, Wyden predicted that CTJ would once again lead the charge against the special interest lobbyists who will attempt to protect their loopholes.

"We have the good fortune of knowing that Bob McIntyre and Citizens for Tax Justice are going to be on the side of the typical working person, the person without the lobbyist, and even though the odds-makers say it can't be done, we are going to get tax reform next Congress. We are going to start it now, we're going as far as we can, and with Bob in the lead, we are going to prosecute it until we go back to what we know makes sense, a fairer tax system, one that isn't rigged against the typical working person, and you're going to be leading the charge, Bob."

Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas noted that his colleagues need to get serious about tax reform.

"Electing Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, to be sure, does not assure us tax justice, it only assures us an opportunity to seek tax justice and to overcome the many entrenched interests who, each year, make our tax code more complex and more unjust. I have not perceived, in 33 months of Democratic control of Congress, much greater appetite on the part of my colleagues to go in and take on the major corporate tax breaks that are in the code than I did in Republican years. But I think we're not going backwards anymore, and if we have a concerted effort led through Citizens for Tax Justice, we have the chance to get after some of the most abusive practices in the code."

Rep. Doggett also criticized Congress's annual practice of enacting "tax extenders," which refer to extensions of tax cuts that are ostensibly temporary and are almost entirely targeted to business interests.

"Each year, corporate lobbyists who only reluctantly knock on the front door of Congress and say, 'Write my corporate client a big fat check,' do not have the slightest hesitancy to come to the side door of Congress and deplete our resources in order to accomplish the very same thing [through the tax code]. And they know once they've done that, they have an entitlement to come back, year after year, in the ritual that is called renewal of the 'extenders.'"

He went on to criticize other tax cuts that are promoted as ways to help the economy even though they are obvious give-aways to corporate interests and have no hope of helping the economy as a whole. The example he cited is the net operating loss (NOL) carryback provisions which are in the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and which several lawmakers now want to expand. He explained that "corporations that paid so little in the past now not only want to pay nothing, but to get a check back as if they were entitled to the Earned Income Tax Credit."

Former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt told the crowd that during every debate over taxes, "the only ally we had was this guy and this organization," meaning Bob McIntyre and Citizens for Tax Justice.

"And the commitment was always to a simple idea: fairness. What's fair for everyone and what's fair for ordinary Americans who don't have much of a voice in our country and in our capitol, certainly on tax matters, which are usually esoteric, complicated issues that nobody quite understands."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Cay Johnston explained that, "with this little, tiny budget and a great entrepreneurial approach, Bob has found ways again and again to make issues come to life, to get people to understand fundamental unfairness and policies that are hurting the economy instead of helping, but are sold under a different guise... There are a whole host of people... who want to loot our pockets with the tax system or... rig the system. And on the other side, there's a handful of people led by Bob."

Finally, the author and journalist Jonathan Chait spoke of how he first encountered Bob McIntyre when both wrote for the American Prospect.

He also spoke of an episode that he believes shows the how much influence CTJ actually has and how much fear it inspires in its opponents. The episode took place in 1999, when the presidential campaign of George W. Bush told the Washington Post it could write an exclusive story about candidate Bush's tax plan only on the condition that the paper not show the plan to any outside experts before writing and publishing their story.

Amazingly, the Post agreed to these terms, and wrote a story about the tax plan that seemed to reinforce the image of Bush as a "compassionate conservative" that the campaign was trying to hard to project. Of course, CTJ did an analysis in the days following the publication of that article and showed that the Bush tax plan was very regressive and that there was nothing compassionate about it.

Chait said the incident is remarkable because the Bush campaign "crafted an entire media strategy around Citizens for Tax Justice. It was, 'Don't show this to Citizens for Tax Justice before we put it out or we're sunk.' And I think they were right."

President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) recently requested ideas from the public about how the federal tax system could be reformed. The comments submitted by Citizens for Tax Justice yesterday begin "We want a fairer, simpler tax code that raises enough money to pay for public services and promotes economic prosperity for all Americans. Our current tax system falls far short of achieving these goals."

The comments note that:

- On the revenue side, even after the current recession ends, we can expect to be funding about a quarter of all non-Social Security spending with borrowed money (including amounts borrowed from the Social Security trust fund).

- As for simplicity and fairness, well, both parties have been guilty of using the tax code to promote a vast array of favored activities. One result is that taxpayers with similar incomes can be treated wildly differently depending on how they make their money or how they spend it.

- In fact, our current tax system allows many of our biggest and most profitable corporations to pay little or no tax.

The rest of the comments lay out principles for solving these problems.

Read CTJ's Suggested Principles for Tax Reform (2 pages)

On July 30, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), along with six cosponsors, introduced the Taxpayer Responsibility, Accountability, and Consistency Act (H.R. 3408) which is aimed at stopping the misclassification of employees as independent contractors.

For each worker that a company "employs," it must withhold income and payroll taxes, pay benefits and unemployment insurance, and comply with labor laws. But companies do not have these expenses when they use "independent contractors" rather than "employees." Independent contractors are themselves responsible for paying the employer half of payroll taxes, as well as the employee half, and they generally don't receive other benefits like health insurance from companies that hire them.

As a result, some employers intentionally misclassify workers as "independent contractors" to avoid these costs.

It's unclear exactly how much misclassifying employees costs the U.S. Treasury. In theory, it would not matter to the Treasury whether payroll taxes are entirely paid by workers (as is the case for independent contractors) or half paid by employers (as is the case for employees) but the reality is that workers misclassified as independent contractors may be unable to shoulder the payroll taxes and are often unaware of this responsibility until the taxes are due. Or the income to independent contractors is simply not reported at all. 

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued earlier this year found that only 8 percent of small businesses with assets under $10 million submitted 1099-MISC forms that are due whenever independent contractors are used. It seems pretty unlikely that only 8 percent of those companies are really hiring independent contractors. When income is not reported to the IRS by a third party, the income is correctly reported only 46 percent of the time.

Many employers use a loophole created by Sec. 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 which is commonly referred to as "Sec. 530 relief." It allows employers to classify workers as independent contractors if they have historically done so, or if it is the industry practice. H.R. 3408 would repeal Sec. 530 and replace it with a new test which would be more difficult to meet. The old "Sec. 530 relief" would continue to be available for one year after the new bill is enacted.

New Data from Citizens for Tax Justice Shows that Many Survey Respondents Saying Income Taxes Are Too High Will Pay No Income Taxes for 2008

A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of respondents felt that the federal income tax they will have to pay this year is "fair." When asked about the specific amount of federal income taxes they pay, just over half felt they pay the right amount or too little.

Fewer than half of those polled said they thought their federal income taxes are "too high." It appears, however, that some of these respondents are basing their answers on the right-wing, anti-tax propaganda they've heard rather than their own income tax liability. A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice finds that many of the respondents who say they pay too much are likely to owe no federal income taxes at all, suggesting that education about the tax system could change their views.

Read the report.

New Data from Citizens for Tax Justice Shows that the U.S. Tax System Is Not as Progressive as You Think

Many politicians, pundits and media outlets have recently claimed that the richest one percent of American taxpayers are providing a hugely disproportionate share of the tax revenue we need to fund public services. New data from Citizens for Tax Justice show that this simply is not true. CTJ estimates that the share of total taxes (federal state and local taxes) paid by taxpayers in each income group is quite similar to the share of total income received by each income group in 2008.

- The total federal, state and local effective tax rate for the richest one percent of Americans (30.9 percent) is only slightly higher than the average effective tax rate for the remaining 99 percent of Americans (29.4 percent).

- From the middle-income ranges upward, total effective tax rates are virtually flat across income groups.

Read the fact sheet.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice answers many of the questions that are frequently asked about taxes during this time of year and clears up the old myths that are still accepted by many as fact. Here is just a sample of some of the questions that are answered:

Question: Does President Obama plan on raising our taxes?

Question: There might be cyclical downturns and upturns in the economy that no one can control, but don't tax cuts help us climb out of downturns a little faster?

Question: What are "tax havens" and why are some people in an uproar over them?

Question: What does it matter to me if someone else is hiding their income from the IRS?

Read the report.

As we approach April 15th, one complaint we often hear is that Americans who work hard and become successful have to pay over a third of their income in federal income taxes. But a recent report from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) shows that this is not remotely true.

As a new CTJ fact sheet explains, the IRS data show that the federal income tax rates paid by the highest-income Americans have dropped substantially since 2000, largely due to cuts in the tax rates on capital gains and dividends pushed through by the Bush Administration. While income from work (salaries and wages) is subject to rates as high as 35 percent, income from investments (long-term capital gains and stock dividends) is taxed at only 15 percent.

The IRS report shows that in 2006 (the latest year for which data are available), the 400 richest income tax filers paid just 17.2 percent of their adjusted gross income (AGI) in federal income taxes. That is down from 22.3 percent in 2000, and is less than half of the top statutory income tax rate of 35 percent.

Read the CTJ fact sheet.

On February 13, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and seven co-sponsors introduced a bill that would impose a tax on securities transactions. The 0.25 percent tax would be imposed on the value of the securities traded. Rep. DeFazio proposes the measure as a way to pay for the various Wall Street bailouts.

This proposal would, in theory, raise revenue from the folks who benefitted from the bailouts. But there's another proposal we like better. Congress should simply eliminate the loophole in the income tax for long-term capital gains and corporate stock dividends, which subjects these forms of income to a top rate of just 15 percent.

People who earn wages must pay income taxes at progressive rates as high as 35 percent, and the first $102,000 a person earns in a year is, in addition, subject to payroll taxes of around 15 percent. So allowing people who live off their investments to pay a tax rate of only 15 percent is grossly unfair. As Warren Buffet recently pointed out, he pays a lower tax rate that his secretary, thanks largely to the loophole in the federal income tax for capital gains and dividends.

And it truly is the wealthy who primarily benefit. A report issued by CTJ in May of last year found that 70 percent of the benefits of President Bush's tax cut for capital gains and dividends goes to the richest one percent of taxpayers. The report also cited IRS data showing that in 2005, this loophole cost the Treasury $91.7 billion.

So getting back to Congressman DeFazio's proposal, we find several advantages of a higher capital gain rate over a securities transaction tax:

• Taxing capital gains at a higher rate would tax only those transactions that resulted in a gain, while a securities transaction tax would be imposed on every trade, whether or not there was a profit.
• A higher capital gains tax rate would be imposed on all capital gain transactions, not just those that arise from exchange-traded securities transactions. (Many derivative transactions are not traded on an exchange.)
• Taxing capital gains at ordinary tax rates would make the tax system much more fair and progressive. Taxpayers in the lower rate brackets would pay a lower rate on their capital gains while taxpayers in the higher brackets would pay a higher rate.
• Taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income would eliminate the many, many tax avoidance schemes that taxpayers use to convert ordinary income to capital gains.
• Taxpayers would make decisions based on economics -- not on the tax treatment of different investments -- eliminating a lot of market distortion.

Unfortunately, many lawmakers feel a strong urge to expand the most egregious loophole in the federal income tax rather than repeal it. On the same day that the DeFazio proposal was introduced, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) introduced a bill to raise the capital loss limitation from the current $3,000 per year to $10,000 per year. This would provide another tax break for the wealthy. Generally, taxpayers can use capital losses to offset capital gains, and if they have net capital losses, they can deduct $3,000 of that against ordinary income. The rest is carried over to future years. If there were no limit, investors could choose to sell only assets that have a loss and offset other types of income, even though they might have unrealized gains in other capital assets. An October, 2008 CTJ report analyzed a similar proposal made by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) during his presidential campaign and criticized the idea for the same reason.

The financial collapse and the economic downturn of the past months begs the question of whether the economic policies of the Bush administration will be repudiated. Supply-side economics, the ideology that has driven the economic agenda of President Bush, has survived for years despite its complete failure in practice. For example, some anti-tax lawmakers and activists now claim that the answer to the economic crisis is... more tax cuts for investors. But now that we have seen two presidents over the last thirty years run up massive budget deficits through supply-side tax cuts that did not seem to make the economy any stronger, there is reason to think that politicians may finally start to see the failures of this ideology.

The Supply-Side Theory

This issue of the Tax Justice Digest explores supply-side economics, which is generally the idea that policies, particularly tax cuts for investment or for those who invest, can change incentives to invest in a way that will yield huge increases in economic growth. Most incredibly of all, this resulting economic growth is often argued to result in so much new tax revenue that the tax cut can be cost-free or can even lead to increased revenues. Keep in mind there is no actual evidence that tax cuts can pay for themselves or actually lead to increased revenues. The Treasury Department under President Bush issued a report finding that there was no evidence for this, and Bush's current budget director has also said that tax cuts do not pay for themselves or lead to increased revenue. And yet, President Bush and many of his allies (including, recently, John McCain) have stated numerous times that tax cuts cause increases in revenue.

The Laffer Curve

This idea of revenue increases resulting from tax cuts -- the crown jewel of the supply-side belief system -- could of course be true in some conceivable context. The concept is illustrated by the Laffer curve, named after its creator, which is basically a diagram showing that tax hikes will increase revenues only up to a point, after which tax hikes will actually lead to a decrease in revenue because incentives to work and invest are so severely damaged. If profits are already taxed at 95 percent, raising that rate might, in fact, lead to less revenue, as people realize there is little to be gained from investing or running a business and there are consequently less profits to be taxed. Lowering that rate could instead lead to more business activity, more business profits, and even more taxes paid on business profits. (Or at the very least, more business profits might be reported, leading to more taxes paid.)

But supply-siders often take this idea, which might apply in very few situations in real life, and apply it to the United States today.

While this is the most bizarre form that supply-side economics takes, even the ideology's more mainstream adherents seem to believe that tax cuts will lead to economic growth that is so great that higher budget deficits and starved public services should be considered nothing more than a minor side-effect.

Lawmakers and Media: The At-Risk Community

When a person brings up the idea that a tax cut might lead to increased revenues, serious economists laugh, but lawmakers and reporters often find themselves strangely mesmerized. An idea that justifies offering constituents both a tax cut and higher spending on services is like a narcotic for some lawmakers, impossible to resist even though its ill effects are obvious to all observers. Meanwhile, reporters who find economics to be outside of their area of expertise give uncritical and expansive coverage to an idea that almost no serious economist actually believes in.

How It Began

The supply-side movement began with, to put it mildly, a colorful cast of characters, as Jonathan Chait describes in his excellent book, The Big Con. One is George Gilder, whose book Wealth and Poverty, helped launch the movement. He is also known for such quotes as "There is no such thing as a reasonably intelligent feminist," and he is a strong proponent of ESP (extrasensory perception). Another is Jude Wanniski, who wrote another important book (The Way the World Works) and preached that high taxes led to all evils, including Hitler's decision to invade his neighbors. He later compared Slobedan Milosevic to Abraham Lincoln and insisted that Saddam Hussein never gassed his people.

Then, of course, there is Arthur Laffer, who met with Wanniski and Dick Cheney one day, drew his diagram on a cocktail napkin and convinced Cheney that tax cuts could result in increased revenues. The Laffer curve was born, and progressives have been trying to throw it back into the fires of Mordor ever since.

Rather than dwelling on these interesting characters, we have decided to provide the following information for those who would like to know what supply-side economics is about, how it has influenced policy-making and how we can respond to it.

Two New Reports Explore the Strange Allure of Supply-Side Economic Policies and the Overwhelming Evidence of Their Failure

Supply-Side Ideas Influence the Presidential Race

Isn't It Time to Reassess the Bush Tax Cuts for Investment Income?

Supply-Side Disasters in the Making at the State Level