Nonetheless, tax policy today is still being driven by his decades-old argument, devised in an economy that looks nothing like today’s. Today’s top marginal tax rate, 39.6 percent, is a little over half what it was then. Looking at a set of industrialized countries from the 1970s until the years preceding the financial crisis, the economists found no meaningful correlation between cuts in top tax rates and economic growth. Big tax cutters like the United States did not grow faster than countries like Denmark, which kept taxes high. Cutting Taxes The top marginal income tax rate has been cut sharply since the 1960s.

Source: New York Times October 03, 2017 14:21 UTC