This was not always a partisan political issue, nor always even an ideological issue. While today it is usually conservative or free market economists who urge reducing tax rates, in order to collect more tax revenues and spur economic growth, it was none other than John Maynard Keynes—hardly a conservative or free-market economist—who said in 1933 that “taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,” that “given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the Budget.”
