I just read that there’s a meeting/vote next week to raise the state’s excise tax on gasoline to make up for the revenue shortfalls in gasoline tax.

California already has some of the highest gas prices in the nation and the clowns running this state wants to push it higher. It seems seems that the people who run this state are indifferent to the economic burdens of higher gas prices as businesses pass those costs on to their customers.

The Laffer curve does not suggest an inverse relationship between higher tax rates and higher revenues. What it does suggest is: that higher marginal tax rates will often NOT result in a linear increase in tax revenues, i.e. a 10% increase in the tax rate will not necessarily result in 10% additional revenues. Similarly, a 10% REDUCTION in marginal tax rates will not inevitably result in a 10% reduction in tax revenues. But the result depends on where current tax rates are on the the proverbial curve.

As you stated, the Reagan tax rate reductions did not reduce tax revenues by what a static analysis would have predicted. And this was true when Kennedy reduced tax rates in the 1960’s, and when Collidge reduced rates in the 1920’s.
And it is, almost without a doubt, true now… We need supply-side economic policies now more than ever!

If I can take the liberty of extrapolating your comment out to it’s logical conclusion, another tax increase is looming on the horizon and probably already being contemplated by Gov. Moonbeam and the dems.

The only questions are: a) what form will the tax increase take and b) how will they sell it to the low information voters this time around. The fact that California voters are going to buy another tax increase is a foregone conclusion. They almost always do. It will be the old canard of saving our schools or “it’s for the children” or some variation thereof.

I remember JB back in the late 70’s. Bogus then and bogus now.