Thomas Sowell is a favorite of a number of the Gormogons and GorT came across this online interview with the columnist and author.  He discusses his essay, “‘Trickle Down Theory’ and ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich'”.  While I’d love to cut and paste just about everything in there (the fluff in it is limited to the page numbers), it is 12 pages long and deserves a careful and considerate read.  Let me highlight a few points just to incentivize you, our dear readers:

1. “For the first 150 years of this country, the federal government did not intervene when the economy turned down.  And all that time the downturns all corrected themselves…”
2. He provides historical-based evidence that high tax rates, particularly those aimed at the higher income brackets, do not necessarily bring in as much revenue as lower tax rates that, in the end, more people end up paying.
3. “…the weight of the evidence is on one side of the argument [lower taxes begets economic growth] rather than the other but, more fundamentally, that there was no serious engagement with the arguments actually advanced but instead an evasion of those argument by depicting them as simply a way of transferring tax burdens from the rich to other taxpayers.”
4. “Implicit in the approach of both academic and media critics of what they call “tax cuts for the rich” and a “trickle-down theory” is a zero-sum conception of the economy.

If these aren’t substantial enough teasers as to why you should go listen to the interview and read the 12-page essay, I might recommend some re-education by The Mandarin.  His techniques don’t hurt….too much.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.