Here's an example that is purely correlative and doesn't control for various factors that can change income, but it does demonstrate that the impact of taxes is really not that big in grand scheme of causation. I'm sure you won't like the fact that it was printed by the Gray Lady and written by Obama's advisor, but keep in mind that I started out by using the CEA Chairman under Bush 43 from '03 to '05. As an aside, you'll find that economists that are liberal will tend to fall on the conservative spectrum of the left, although you do get the occasional Paul Krugman.
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/bu...=1&sq=goolsbee
An example illustrates the point: Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, has compiled data on the incomes of the very rich from 1913 to 2006. Using his data, my calculations show that in the four years after top marginal rates were cut in 1981 and 1986, and in the three years after the rate cut of 2003, average real salaries (subtracting inflation) for the top 1 percent of earners grew 18.8 percent, 22.5 percent and 17.4 percent. But for the bottom 90 percent of earners over those periods, the average salary changes were 2.6 percent, minus 0.3 percent and minus 0.1 percent. A supply-sider might see this as evidence of the growth power of cutting top rates.
But the data also show that incomes at the top have been growing rapidly regardless of what happened to tax rates. In the four years after the increase in top marginal rates in 1993, average salaries grew 18.7 percent among the top 1 percent of earners and less than 0.1 percent for the bottom 90 percent.
Seeing the same pattern when taxes rose as when they fell indicates that tax cuts weren’t responsible. It suggests that cuts for high-income taxpayers likely gave windfalls to those whose incomes were already rising sharply because of broader market forces.
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