Executives Play Down the Possibility of Raises

There aren’t even a preponderance of correlative data that shows a link between tax cuts and economic growth—except where economic growth is defined as a disproportionate increase in wealth concentration in ever smaller percentages of the population. The opposite has been shown—and quite conclusively—with decades of data (that tax cuts do not spur economic growth).

Moreover, seeing as how you’re dragging out the old government waste trope—its notable that you conveniently neglect to directly indict those on the receiving end of this “waste”. It cannot be solely the government’s fault that private corporate contractors happily pocket this waste. If waste is something you find especially onerous, shouldn’t we start by pointing the finger at the private companies who submit “wasteful” bids/invoices? If the government is paying too much and wasting public funds on contractors, doesn’t the fault lie with those submitting the bids/invoices? If there is nothing at all wrong with their bids, and we want to say it’s acceptable to bid any amount so long as the bidding is, say, fairly open to all comers, then how exactly can the government be guilty of “waste”? Seems every time the government is criticized for waste, it’s always a one-sided critique. Meanwhile, attempting to reign in this alleged waste with regulations, bid caps, stronger negotiating power, or some form of (gasp!) price control mechanism for public projects is rather uniformly met with charges of abuse of power, not playing by the rules, crippling free markets, or some other such nonsense. If there is waste, it starts with exorbitant bids/invoices for that $200 screwdriver. Seems to me the government is simply playing by the rules and paying what is demanded. There’d be a shit storm if they didn’t.

Yes, deductive logic. Way better than empirical studies, if that's what you were looking for. You only need the assumption that demand curves in the labor market slope downward to deduce that taxes in that market cause deadweight losses, and the evidence that demand curves nearly always slope downward, not just in the labor market, is every transaction you have ever made and every transaction you have ever heard anyone talk about. There are empirical studies that confirm this, but they are irrelevant because you have access to much better evidence, and you should just dismiss the empirical studies that say otherwise. If controlled experiments showed this wrong, you should assume that the researchers are lying about their results, because that would genuinely be a more likely explanation than demand curves not actually sloping downward.

By the way, simple theories are more likely to be true, not less.

> Economic growth is probably only a matter of distribution.

There are exactly two reasons there can be an increase in economic growth and they are intensive and extensive growth. Either you make more efficient use of inputs or you have more inputs. Deadweight losses mean you make less efficient use of inputs.

In principle, the inefficiency caused by the taxes could be offset by the way they are spent if they were used to correct a market failure, which could increase economic efficiency or even increase the inputs. But market failures do not exist so in practice this does not happen and taxes always harm economic growth.

Well, Nobel-prize winners and millions of economists around the world disagree with you, but I'm sure that your personal opinion trumps all of that.

> Because clearly anyone who disagrees with you is only doing so because they don't understand?

No, because you mixed "value of labor at the time" and "price elasticity of labor demand". If you had understood what price elasticity of labor demand meant, you wouldn't mix the two.

If cost of labor is X, demand for labor is Y, then "value of labor at the time" is X and "price elasticity of labor demand" is dY/dX.

1. Favors certain types of businesses that can more readily arbitrage their domicile (e.g. Apple, Google).

2. Creates an incentive for companies to pay accountants and lawyers a large amount of money to find ways to engage in #1. All of this money is, in economic terms, deadweight loss.

If you look at the effective tax rates companies were paying before this change, they were more or less harmonized with the rest of the world[1]. What was not harmonized was the statutory rate. What this meant in practice is that big companies with the resources to exploit the loophole paid the low rates, and companies without those resources paid the high rates. And the resources that were expended by the companies to accomplish this were 100% unproductive. Harmonizing the statutory rate makes things fair, and eliminates the need to waste money on those types of accountants.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52419