This article discusses the prospects for long-term deficit reduction given the strenuous opposition to higher taxes by influential Republican adviser Grover Norquist, who has gotten virtually every Republican in Congress to sign his no-new-taxes pledge

The successor to Keynesian economics was supply-side economics, which remains the core economic philosophy of the Republican Party. Its success wasn't only due to the attractiveness of tax cuts by politicians; a great deal of serious economic research underpinned the supply-side program, a point...

The downfall of Keynesian economics resulted from it being blamed for the inflation of the 1970s. In part this is because it had an inadequate theory of what caused inflation, having relied too heavily on the Phillips curve -- an idea found nowhere in Keynes' writings. In fact, Keynes was very...

This essay explains Keynesian economics as essentially an ex post rationale for policies Keynes thought were necessary to deal with deflation. In essence, he wanted inflation to compensate for deflation, but contrary to conservative dogma, Keynes was not a crude inflationist -- he wanted stable...

There have been a number of proposals lately to impose a new tax on securities or financial transactions, both as a revenue measure and a way of disciplining Wall Street speculation. This article argues that such a tax would be a bad idea and that it makes more sense to tax financial activities...

This article, the second of three, reviews the historical origins of the Laffer Curve from the Middle Ages through the 19th century. It begins with the work of Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century, whose work came to the attention of economist Robert Mundell in 1971. Mundell...

This article, the third of three, examines the historical origins of the Laffer Curve in the 20th century through the 1970s. It notes that Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon often invoked Laffer Curve arguments in the 1920s. In the 1930s, economists John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter made...

This article, the first of three, reviews the origins of the Laffer Curve in the 1970s. Notes that economist Norman Ture, who worked closely with Rep. Jack Kemp, probably had more to do with popularizing the idea of a tax cut that could pay for itself than economist Arthur Laffer did