[ExI] Free Trade

[John Clark]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 6:35 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

*> Before I go on, is there anything above you wish to dispute?*


*Yeah, a couple.  *


> *>…Laffer theory? All Laffer said is that to maximize the amount of money
>> the federal government receives the tax rate should not be too high or too
>> low, and to illustrate that point he drew a curve on a blackboard that is
>> called by some the "Laffer curve" but that I call a keen grasp of the
>> obvious. Laffer never claimed to have derived the equation that produced
>> that curve, and he certainly never came up with a figure of 20% which you
>> mentioned, he never came up with a number at all… John K Clark*
>
>
> *> History has established the approximately 20% number with the Reagan
> tax cuts of the 1980s.*
>

*History has established no such thing. The Reagan tax cuts affected the
very rich far more than the very poor, overall he cut income tax rates by
about 25% over three years, mainly by reducing the top tax rate by a
lot, from 70% to 28%. It was called trickle down economics. And what does
history tell us resulted from this? Well…  when Reagan took office in 1981,
the national debt was roughly $900 billion, when he left office in 1989, it
had tripled to $2.7 trillion. The debt as a percentage of GDP
also increased significantly during the Reagan years, it increased from
26.2% in 1980 to 40.9% in 1988.*

*> I don’t see why interest on the current debt is placed under
> discretionary spending, but that is how economists treat it.*


*Spike, do you really think the US should just renege on paying the
national debt and turn US savings bonds into junk bonds overnight?! Do you
really think it would be OK for millions of American citizens who were
conservative and saved for their retirement by putting their money and what
they and everybody else assumed was the safest possible investment, US
savings bonds, became penniless overnight?  And if we could just say we're
not going to pay the national debt whenever we like with no negative
consequences, then why on earth are you so worried about it?? *

*John K Clark*





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