An Unbelievably Bad Wall Street Journal Editorial

Even by the standards of the WSJ editorial page, which has a relationship to truth analogous to the relationship that Ebola has to French kissing.

Mark Thoma, an economist, blogs writes about the vicissitudes of the Laffer curve.

What the Laffer curve says is that there is a point where tax increases, through depressing economic activity, and encouraging tax avoidance behavior, will actually depress revenue.

It's fairly straightforward. the question is where this point.

So Kevin Hasset, comes up with the following graph:



What's wrong with the graph? He's plotting through three points out of over a dozen to push a lie.

A least squares regression gets this:



Tax receipts increase as taxes go up, now there's a shocker.

In fact Laffer himself suggested that the point where tax receipts would drop would be well north of 50%.

There is the additional lie that much of what they are showing by way of Norway's revenues are as a direct result of revenues generated by it's massive reserves in fossil fuels.

Deliberately and transparently dishonest editorials are being given legitimacy because of the sterling news operation of the Journal, and is why there is a part of me that hopes that Murdock destroys the WSJ.