And what do you know, this is what I get for posting things from my smartphone where I look at the picture and don't even look at the actual article.
This image is backed up by a study after all. The study spans 65 years and it's from the Congressional Research Service. They found:
Analysis of six decades of data found that top tax rates "have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth." However, the study found that reductions of capital gains taxes and top marginal rate taxes have led to greater income inequality. Past studies cited in the report have suggested that a broad-based tax rate reduction can have "a small to modest, positive effect on economic growth" or "no effect on economic growth."
Table A-I and A-II at the end of the report do include regression analyses. Let's hope someone over there has taken econometrics
Also, it's worth noting:
"These results are generally consistent with previous research on tax cuts. Some studies find that a broad based tax rate reduction has a small to modest, positive effect on economic growth.25 Other studies have found that a broad based tax reduction, such as the Bush tax cuts, has no effect on economic growth.26 It would be reasonable to assume that a tax rate change limited to a small group of taxpayers at the top of the income distribution would have a negligible effect on
economic growth."
What they are referring to @ 26 are the following citations:
"Martin Feldstein and Douglas W. Elmendorf, “Budget Deficits, Tax Incentives, and Inflation: A Surprising Lesson
from the 1983-1984 Recovery,” in Tax Policy and the Economy, ed. Lawrence H. Summers, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1989), pp. 1-23; William G. Gale and Samara R. Potter, “An Economic Evaluation of the Economic Growth
and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001,” National Tax Journal, vol. 55, no. 1 (March 2002), pp. 133-186; and
William G. Gale and Peter R. Orszag, “Economic Effects of Making the 2001 and 2003 Tax Cuts Permanent,”
International Tax and Public Finance, vol. 12 (2005), pp. 193-232."
Since Martin Felstein was Ronald Reagan's director at the Council of Economic Advisors, I don't think this analysis could be skewed by any sort of liberal agenda. In their 1989 abstract of the paper (
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2819) on the Reagan recovery, they write:
"The first two years of the economic expansion that began in 1983 were unusually strong and were accompanied by better inflation performance than would have been expected on the basis of experience in past recoveries. Our evidence contradicts the popular view that the recovery was the result of a consumer boom financed by reductions in the personal income tax. We also find no support for the proposition that the recovery reflected an increase in the supply of labor induced by the reduction in personal marginal tax rates.
The driving force behind the recovery of nominal demand was the shift to an expansionary monetary policy"
Of course, I don't expect any of this to sway a certain poster, who has proved himself impervious to actual argument.
