"Trickle Down" Theory and "Tax Cuts for the Rich" Quotes

“The results show how unreliable peer consensus can be, even when it is a peer consensus of highly intellectual people, if those people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms, rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“Some years ago, in my syndicated column, I challenged anyone to name any economist, of any school of thought, who had actually advocated a “trickle down” theory. No one quoted any economist, politician or person in any other walk of life who had ever advocated such a theory, even though many readers named someone who claimed that someone else had advocated it, without being able to quote anything actually said by that someone else. 2”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“The facts are unmistakably plain, for those who bother to check the facts. In 1921, when the tax rate on people making over $100,000 a year was 73 percent, the federal government collected a little over $700 million in income taxes, of which 30 percent was paid by those making over $100,000. By 1929, after a series of tax rate reductions had cut the tax rate to 24 percent on those making over $100,000, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income taxes, of which 65 percent was collected from those making over $100,000.[10”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“Under these escalating wartime income tax rates, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of more than $300,000— a huge sum in the money of that era— declined from well over a thousand in 1916 to fewer than three hundred in 1921. The total amount of taxable income earned by people making over $300,000 declined by more than four-fifths during those years.[11”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“What actually followed the cuts in tax rates in the 1920s were rising output, rising employment to produce that output, rising incomes as a result and rising tax revenues for the government because of the rising incomes, even though the tax rates had been lowered.”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“At various times and places, particular individuals have argued that existing tax rates are so high that the government could collect more tax revenues if it lowered those tax rates, because the changed incentives would lead to more economic activity, resulting in more tax revenues out of rising incomes, even though the tax rate was lowered.”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“But the actual arguments advocated by Secretary Mellon had nothing to do with a “trickle-down theory.” Mellon pointed out that, under the high income tax rates at the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1921, vast sums of money had been put into tax shelters such as tax-exempt municipal bonds, instead of being invested in the private economy, where this money would create more output, incomes and jobs.[8”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made. While”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"

“Moreover, the reasons for proposing such tax cuts are often verbally transformed from those of the advocates— namely, changing economic behavior in ways that generate more output, income and resulting higher tax revenues— to a very different theory attributed to the advocates by the opponents, namely “the trickle-down theory.” No such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories, including J.A. Schumpeter’s monumental 1,260-page History of Economic Analysis. Yet this non-existent theory[*] has become the object of denunciations from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the political arena. It has been attacked by Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton and Professor Peter Corning of Stanford, among others, and similar attacks have been repeated as far away as India.[2] It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made. While”
― Thomas Sowell, "Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich"