Arthur B. Laffer, et al., "The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doo

Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore & Peter J. Tanous, "The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy--If We Let It Happen"

Threshold Editions | 2008 | ISBN: 1416592385 | 352 pages | siPDF | 5.6 MB

Arthur Laffer—the father of supply-side economics and a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board—joins economist Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and investment advisor Peter J. Tanous to send Americans an urgent message: We risk losing the exceptional standard of living that has made us the envy of the rest of the world if the pro-growth policies of the last twenty-five years are reversed by a new president.

Since the early 1980s, the United States has experienced a wave of prosperity almost unprecedented in history in terms of wealth creation, new jobs, and improved living standards for all. Under the leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Americans changed the incentive structure on taxes, inflation, and regulation, and as a result the economy roared back to life after the anti-growth, high-inflation 1970s.

Now the rest of the world is following the American economic growth model of lower tax rates, more economic freedom, and sound money. Paradoxically, one country is moving away from these growth policies and putting its prosperity at risk—America.

On the eve of a critical presidential election, Laffer, Moore, and Tanous provide the factual information every American needs in order to understand exactly how we achieved the prosperity many people have come to take for granted, and explain how the policies of Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi can cause America to lose its status as the world's growth and job creation machine.

The End of Prosperity is essential reading for all Americans who value our nation's free enterprise system and high standard of living, and want to know how to protect their own investments in the coming storm.

Contents

“List of Figures

List of Tables

Forward: Prosperity in the Balance by Larry Kudlow

1The Gathering Economic Storm

 America: What Went Right

 Movin' On Up

 Don't Know Much About History

 The Four Killers of Prosperity

 Which Brings Us to Today

 The Imminent Economic Danger

 Is There a 50 Percent Tax "Baracket" in Your Future?

 Fair Trade Means No Trade

2How a Cocktail Napkin Changed the World: The Laffer Curve

 What the Cocktail Napkin Taught Us

 Mick Jagger: Supply-Sider

 The Logic of the Laffer Curve

 Laffer Curve Lessons

  Principle 1. When you tax something you get less of it and when you tax something less, you get more of it

  Principle 2. The best tax system helps make poor people rich, not rich people poor

  Principle 4. If tax rates get too high, they may lead to a reduction in tax receipts—as demonstrated by the Laffer Curve

  Principle 5. An efficient tax system has a broad tax base and a low tax rate

  Principle 6. People, businesses, and capital move from high-tax to low-tax areas

 Is There a Laffer Curve Effect from Taxing Beer?

 Supply-Side Economics 101

 Uncle Sam Versus the Laffer Curve

 Onslaught from the Left

 "Trickle Down" Economics

3"We Can Do Bettah": Tax-Cutting Lessons from the Twentieth Century

 Whither the JFK Democrats

 Laffer Curve History Lessons

 Harding-Coolidge Tax Cuts

 Crash!

 The Kennedy Tax Cuts

 The Age of Affluence

4Honey, We Shrunk the Economy: The Awful 1970s

 The Destructive Legacy of LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerry Ford, and Jimmy Carter

 The Four Stooges of the American Presidency

 LBJ and the Great Society

 The Nixon Years

 Whip Inflation Now

 The Carter Catastrophe

 Washington Creates an Energy Crisis

 Carter's Inflation

 Losing the Cold War

 Carter's Malaise

 The Misery President

5The Twenty-Five-Year Boom: The Reagan Economic Revolution

 Reagan's Riverboat Gamble

 Stay the Course

 What Was Reaganomics?

 The Kemp-Roth Tax Cut

 Taming the Hydra-Headed Monster of Inflation

 The Plunge in Interest Rates

 Get Government Off Our Backs

 The Regulatory Octopus

 Tear Down These Trade Walls

 A Decade of Greed or Grandeur?

  The Reagan Bull Market

  Prosperity Rediscovered

  What War on the Middle Class?

  The Great American Jobs Machine

 We're in the Money

  Myth: Decade of Greed

  Myth: Trickle Down Economics

  Myth: The Era of Debt and Deficits

  Myth: The Rich Got Richer and the Poor Got Poorer

6What Bill Clinton Could Teach Barack Obama

 Read My Lips

 Crime of the Century

 It's the Economy, Stupid

 What Bill Clinton Got Right

 The End of Welfare as We Know It

7How George W Bush Soaked the Rich

 Bush Turns to the Supply Side

 Lower Tax Rates, More Revenue

 Drunken Sailor Spending

8Bankruptcy 90210: As Goes California, So Goes the Nation

 The Tax Revolt Heard Round the World

 The Reverse California Gold Rush

 Moving Up and Moving Out

 Growth States of the Future

 Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

 Hasta La Vista, Baby

9Socialism, Non, the Laffer Curve, Oui: Supply-Side Economics Takes the World by Storm

 Flat and Happy

 The Globe Tilts to the Supply Side

 Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't All Be Wrong

 The "Irish Miracle"

 The Laffer Curve Goes Global

 Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise—Is There a Tradeoff?

10How to Create a Bull Market: The Capital Gains Tax Validates the Laffer Curve

 Capital Equals Jobs and Higher Wages

 What History Teaches Us

 President Bush's Vindication

 What's the Fairest Tax Cut of Them All?

 Ending Capital Punishment

11Throw Momma from the Train: The Unfair Estate Tax

 A Death Tax Tragedy Is Coming in 2010

 Taxes Everlasting

12Protectionism Then and Now: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930

 Smoot-Hawley: The Killer Tariff

 Did It Cause the Great Depression?

 The Poverty of Closed Borders

 A Tale of Two States

 The South Carolina Resurgence

 The Dreaded Trade Deficit

 The Outsourcing Boogeyman

 Closed Minds and Closed Borders

13Many Happy Returns: The Flat Tax Solution

 The Supply-Side Version of Robin Hood

 How to Fix the Tax System Once and for All

 Why Do Governments Impose Taxes on Citizens?

 The Income Tax Monstrosity

 Flat Means Fair

 All Aboard the Flat Tax Express

 The Laffer Flat Tax

 Flat and Happy

 How Will It Work?

 What Is the Flat Tax Rate?

 Flat Tax Versus Fair Tax

 Why a Flat Tax Works

 Appendix: The Flat Tax Math

14The Death of Economic Sanity

 The America Sell-Off

 November 4, 2008: Fright Night

 Onslaught from the Left

 Tax the Rich

 Tax the Middle Class

 Red Tape Rising

 Unfree Trade

 The Incredible Sinking Dollar

 Big Labor's Big Comeback

 Let's Spend Again

 Here Comes Hillary Care

 Running on Empty

 Cap and Kill—The Economy

 Return of the Nativists

 A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall

15Protecting Your Investments in the Troubled Times Ahead

 How Do We Build a Portfolio for the Ages?

 A Typical Well-Balanced Portfolio

 Domestic Stocks

 International Stocks

 Fixed Income

 How Many Stocks and Bonds Should You Choose?

 How to Invest in These Different Asset Classes

 Other Investments

 Beating Inflation—Tips

 Gold

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index”

Tags: EconomicPolicy, qPolitics, qHistory

No non-free mirrors allowed

See Also:

Neil Ferguson, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World"

David M. Kennedy, "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)"

James T. Patterson, "Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States)"

Sean Wilentz, "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008"

James T. Patterson, "Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (Oxford History of the United States)"

Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism"