The next time you hear about a $500 million tax increase, you might want to recall the words Thomas Sowell offered his readers today.
People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a “$300 billion tax increase” or a “$500 billion tax decrease.” That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate.
The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been wrong far too often to base national policies on them.
When Congress was considering raising the capital-gains tax rate from 20 percent to 28 percent in 1986, the Congressional Budget Office advised Congress that this would increase the revenue received from that tax. But the Congressional Budget Office was wrong, and not simply about the amount of the tax-revenue increase, because the capital-gains tax revenue actually fell.
There was nothing unique about this example of tax rates and tax revenues moving in opposite directions from each other — and also in opposite directions from the predictions of the Congressional Budget Office. Reductions of the capital-gains tax rates in 1978, 1997, and 2003 all led to increased revenues from that tax.
The Congressional Budget Office is by no means the only government agency whose prophecies have been grossly unreliable. Anyone who looks at the history of the Federal Reserve System will find many painful examples of wrong prophecies that led to policies with bad consequences for the whole economy.
In a worldwide context, during the 20th century, economic central planning by governments — prophecy at the grandest level — led to so many bad consequences in countries around the world that even most socialist and Communist governments abandoned central planning by the end of that century.
