Krugman on Kudlow ...

[GeorgeGist]

Link to tweet

As always, facts have a well-known anti-Trump bias.Below, revenue as % of GDP, falling off a cliff. Is the administration's top economic official ignorant or lying? Does it matter? 2/

[Hoyt]

1. Apparently he also has occluded carotid arteries, in addition to coronary artery disease.

[WhiteTara]

7. Not enough oxygen to the brain makes

you say very stupid things. Not to mention the stroke factor.

[BSdetect]

2. kudlow is a kraphead

[pansypoo53219]

3. jeez. recession or DEPRESSION? the moron is that bad. hang on.

[Jim Lane]

4. I agree with Krugman but his chart doesn't prove his point.

He shows only that revenues expressed as a percentage of GDP are falling.

The supply-side argument is that lower tax rates will reduce revenues as a percentage of GDP, but will also stimulate enormous gains in economic activity. As a result, revenues will be a smaller share of a larger pie, so that the actual amount of government revenues will be higher even as the percentage is lower.

I agree with him that, historically, it hasn't happened. To show it, however, he needs to present data on gross revenues, not as a share of GDP.

[Lucky Luciano]

5. There are tax rates high enough where the usual right wing talking point is true....

...namely 100% is definitely the case as there is no reason to work at all so no revenues for the government unless the taxes are lowered. It is definitely false when taxes are 0% because raising taxes clearly increases revenues from there. Somewhere in the middle is the optimal tax rate for government revenues. Republicans think that rate is close to 0% which is stupid.

I don’t know where that optimal tax rate is.

[progree]

6. Federal receipts - here's the raw dollar numbers, and it's not good news for the Greedbanger Junta

This has the graph. Last observation: 2018 Q1 2038.234 $billions
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W006RC1Q027SBEA

Sorry I don't know how to embed FRED graphs without going through a lot of gymnastics of taking a screen shot and saving as a .jpg or .png or whatever and uploading to my Imgur account and all that.


And the data, of which the last few quarters are shown below. In $billions.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/W006RC1Q027SBEA.txt

2016-01-01 2060.060 Billion dollars
2016-04-01 2096.292
2016-07-01 2131.564
2016-10-01 2112.996
2017-01-01 2133.378
2017-04-01 2150.665
2017-07-01 2176.787
2017-10-01 2178.271
2018-01-01 2038.234

The "2018-01-01 2038.234" is actually 2018 Q1 which BEGINS Jan 1 and ENDS March 31. So yup, the first 3 months of the tax cuts does not seem to be very helpful. 2018 Q1 federal revenues down 6.4% from the previous quarter, and down 4.5% from 2017's Q1.

The news today is that the final estimate of Q1 2018 GDP is a 2.0% annualized growth rate. Not stellar.
But supposedly Q2 is expected to be a lot better with some economists predicting a better than 5% annualized growth rate, supposedly mostly because of the tax cut. LOL.

[WhiteTara]

8. The Kansas experiment gone national.