At risk of being called a “name dropper,” I’ll name drop Arthur Laffer. I’m lucky enough to call him a friend, and whenever I see him I always remind him that he’s vastly improved the terms of the economic debate. Think about it.
Laffer’s calls for tax cuts in the 1970s were met at the time with lots of critiques in the economics field. In politics too. The view then was that tax cuts would cause an inflationary breakout. One person who didn’t agree with such an abjectly foolish viewpoint was Ronald Reagan. In 1980 his economic platform included tax cuts, only for George H.W. Bush (in the GOP primary) and Jimmy Carter (in the general election) to claim that reductions in the penalty placed on work would cause inflation. On national TV in front of Carter, Reagan wondered in one of their debates why it was inflationary for people to keep what they earn, but not inflationary for government to take what people earn only to spend it. Reagan won by a landslide.
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