Torture versus collateral damage; the bigger evil?

[carl]

You don't know what you don't know. My blog's reader stats shows that there are enough thick-skinned Americans who have not too much of a problem with my style.

I stand corrected. Your blog log is irrefutable proof that arch lectures about European superiority play well with American audiences. Who'd a thunk it?

You don't seem to have understood the meaning of ceteris paribus. It means you change one thing, and but one thing. Everything may change as a result, there's no problem with that.
Ceteris paribus is a necessary guideline for discussing the effect of one action. It's requires for clarity of thought and arguments in such a case.

It might be easier if you use English. You have great facility in that. I have none in Latin.

And the only one who places a "+" between both here is you.
Tax base * tax rate - deductions + (black box for other complicated exceptions) = revenue
or simplified,
Tax base * tax rate = revenue
Halved tax rate requires more than doubled tax base (income) to generate increased revenues.

Well no, you wrote in post 30 "income + tax rate = revenues." It is the first line you wrote. Honest. No wonder it didn't make any sense. It was a typo. I should have figured that.

This was funny. Read a bit about what Volcker did at the time, please.

I remember what Volcker did at the time, and I read a bunch of articles just today. He was Carter's second choice and started to try and beat inflation in Sept of 79 and nothing much worked. I remember that Reagan ran political interference for him and reappointed him. And I read that inflation started to go down in Oct of 81, which was when the first of those tax cuts hit.

So I figure that Reagan handled the 'stag' part and Reagan and Volcker probably did the 'flation' part.

Actually, you spend %GDP as well, and this is important. Growth in the economy yields growth in wages and public employees will get a (in the long term) corresponding raise, employees of contractors will get a raise, contractor shareholders will expect more profit. This means public expenditures will grow approximately proportional to GDP.
So you better keep your government revenue stable in %GDP terms in the ceteris paribus ('tax rate change and no other change') case.

What you spend may be viewed as %GDP but you actually spend dollars.

If your prime object is to please gov employees "you better keep your government revenue stable in %GDP terms". But I figure that the object of gov isn't to please gov employees, it is or should be to stay out of the way of the people and take from them as little as possible. So if you act on that, and reduce the burden public employees place upon the taxpayer, then reduction of revenue as %GDP is a good thing.

Anyway, I don't care now any more. I understand there are more than a hundred million people out there who actually fell for the ridiculous notion that cutting taxes increases revenues.

Perhaps more than a hundred million people disagree with you, not because they are gullible, but because you might, possibly, just maybe, be wrong.

There's no fun in discussing this. I actually spent hundreds of hours on learning fiscal theory stuff at the university, it was one of my specialisations. Your position qualifies as joke in-between, I simply cannot take you and the Laffer curve believers serious enough for a greater discussion effort.

Gee. Sorry about that. But be consoled that education is never wasted.

Your opinion is entrenched enough to withstand evidence anyway.

Ohhkkkay.

This depends on the marginal rate of utility of public and private spending and is an altogether different issue.

Yes it does. I figure the private individual is wiser at spending his money than a gov bureaucrat is at spending somebody else's. So it is best to let the private individual keep most of it.