Economist Arthur Laffer’s newly published analysis of the United States’ 110-year history of income taxes is rife with paradoxes, among them that the higher the tax rates that the U.S. government imposes on the rich, the smaller the share of taxes the rich pay.
Or put another way, the more the government attempted to capture the wealth of the top 1 percent of earners, the larger the tax burden that the lowest 95 percent of taxpayers ended up paying. According to Laffer and his co-authors, the history of income taxes in the United States is a perpetual case of the government’s ostensibly trying to take rich people’s money and the rich finding creative ways to avoid giving it up.
