As my brother said today on his show, today would have been Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday. He passed away in 2006. He won the Nobel Prize in economics for 1976, 200 years after our country began. He believed firmly in the economic principles of our founding. Read more
While Congress debates whether to increase taxes on the “rich” (yes, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is a tax increase), it it worth reflecting on the words of the late economist, Milton Friedman.
Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.
And, a study done by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University examining the data from World War II forward bears this out. For every new dollar in taxes raised by the government, Congress appropriates anywhere between $1.05 and $1.81 in additional spending. The study was done in the late 1980’s and has been updated over time using data since then, variables and models,
[b]ut no matter how we configured the data and no matter what variables we examined, higher tax collections never resulted in less spending.
So, when you hear the left bemoan the fact that taxes must be increased on the “rich” in order to reduce the deficit, understand that no such deficit reduction will happen. New income will result in new spending, and then some.
Congress seems incapable of doing anything else.
I’ve been reading a bit about Milton Friedman, a Hoover Institution economist – not a politician – who past away in 2006. Conservatives can learn quite a bit from this great man. We need another conservative economic mentor for present-day, and maybe Dan Mitchell is that person?