It's not relevant what the guy says. It's relevant what happened.

Reagan did cut taxes a lot, lost revenue, had to raise the tax again multiple times. Why do you think did he do so?

I tell you: His best trait was his ability to recognize some of his errors. That's why he ran from Lebanon, that's why he raised taxes.

The only ways how reducing a normal tax rate could increase revenues are
* one-time effects with taxes such as capital gains taxes where the tax subjects have the ability to determine the period in which to pay taxes (they move tax payment into a low-rate period fearing a later rates hike).
* A revenue increase not ceteris paribus, but caused by economic growth from period to period, overcompensating a small rates reduction.

At a very, very high tax rate you cold gain a revenue increase by reducing tax evasion a lot and making the taxed activity substantially more attractive. This is the Laffer curve special case which is pure theory, for such stupidly high effective tax rates are excessively rare. They're even outlawed by constitutional court in Germany, when it said that the Legislative shall ban activities or items it wants to disappear, not strangulate them.

A look at the item to be taxed shows that it never expands nearly as much as required to compensate for the reduced rates.
For example, incomes don't double when you cut income tax by half.

Reagan's tax effects on revenues:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics#Tax_revenue
Vast reduction of revenue by big cut (first tax law), clear gains of revenue by increasing the effective rates again by closing loopholes (second one), gains by increased gasoline tax.

_________


This stuff is actually quite relevant to the torture topic, for the U.S. shows the (a certainly not unique) human susceptibility to the big lie; repeated wrong and seemingly unbelievable assertions begin to accumulate believers over time, and this supports some horrible policies.

I suppose it's especially troublesome in the U.S. because the U.S. has the critical mass to justify the required effort by special interests and it's large enough to sustain an alternate reality in public discourse. "The Netherlands could not sustain an alternate reality such as "torture is fine" or "cut taxes to increase revenues" because it's a smaller country and its people watch a lot of German TV. Dutch special interests would need to manipulate Dutch AND German perceptions, and they cannot muster the money and access for this.


There are not only horrible policies, but also discussions about horrible policies between big lie believers and the unconvinced. The conflict goes on and on and on and the end result is that the U.S. is still discussing or unable to fix problems which have been closed cases in many European countries for between 20 and 110 years.
I suppose these discussions and policies could not be sustained if there were more interactions with non-anglophone countries.


Again; to discuss costs and benefits or torture alone is already a sign of failure. It means one is discussing something which shouldn't even get any attention, but be dismissed because the correct answer should be obvious by now (and probably has been for a long time; one of Reagan's primaries competitors already called the Laffer Curve "Voodoo economics").