I’m curious, is there a consensus that Reaganomics was faulty entirely?
Intuitively I feel like a little bit of both is true.
If a business owner is taxed out the yin yang then he just has less capital to spend on growing his business. If he wants to grow his business by hiring more people, or other local spending, perhaps that is an undesired effect (If you believe a small business in growth mode is a more powerful engine than a government allocating spending to low bid contractors somehow)
On the other hand if he doesn’t want to grow his business by hiring people, for example by buying AI powered robots to do the jobs instead, and then laying off all the staff, then I say tax away.
Your fundamental mistake here is assuming any SMEs have the scale and creative accountants to truly take advantage of this. In practice, SMEs have their lunch eaten while the mega corps really take advantage. Those large companies don’t even buy robots with these handouts, generally. They use it for stock buy-backs to enrich shareholders.
First of all, I want to address those who are downvoting you: this poster asked a genuine question in good faith. It’s okay to disagree with them, but downvoting seems a bit harsh.
Ok, I feel better. 😊
Now, they have done extensive research into the failures of TDE. Also it should be pointed out that high-income earners ($216k at the time) were taxed at a marginal rate of 70%, but was drastically reduced to 38% in 1986, and of course it’s gone down since then (albeit nominally).
