Mar­ket­place, a pub­lic radio pro­gram, has been cov­er­ing Wealth and Poverty issues on its pro­grams for sev­eral months. On July 26th, a seg­ment titled “Arthur Laf­fer on income inequal­ity, rais­ing taxes” was broad­cast. The audio can be down­loaded here. Fol­low­ing is an excerpt from the tran­script:

Hor­wich: Many econ­o­mists will say the data is extremely incon­clu­sive in prac­tice as to how mar­ginal tax changes actu­ally affect per­sonal and busi­ness activ­ity. What makes you so sure?

Laf­fer: Because basi­cally, these econ­o­mists you talk about never worked in the real world. They’re just look­ing at the econo­met­rics and the data there. If you ever go and look at what’s being rec­om­mended from the CPA firms, from finan­cial plan­ners. If you actu­ally look at how they go through, do their tax returns — believe me, they are more focused on their taxes than you and I are on their taxes.

Hor­wich: But am I right that I just heard you crit­i­cize econ­o­mists for actu­ally look­ing at the data and mak­ing their deci­sions based on that?

Laf­fer: No, no, not look­ing at the data. I think it’s won­der­ful to look at the data. But I think it’s really silly to look at this accu­rate data and not make any judg­ments beyond those aggre­gate data

I was espe­cially struck by this last state­ment about judg­ment ver­sus data. It sounded to me that Laf­fer has made the judg­ment to ignore the data! (more…)