Letters to the Editor: Supply-side tax schemes work — it’s the spending that’s the problem

To the editor: I totally agree with columnist David Lazarus that “trickle down” theory is a “massive hoax” — by the left.

If Lazarus had done some more research, he might have discovered that economist have not advocated anything called “trickle down,” a straw-man term Lazarus obviously enjoys.

What so-called supply-side theory suggests is that lowering taxes on the rich encourages them to invest in the economy instead of tax shelters, and in so doing, it actually increases revenues and stimulates job growth. This it has done fairly consistently, with varying results.

What sabotages the theory is uncontrolled spending, a consequence that has frustrated practitioners from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. Supply-side actually works pretty well, all things considered.

Patrick M. Dempsey, Granada Hills

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To the editor: The Presidential Medal of Freedom for supply-side economist Arthur Laffer is both a joke and a travesty. One can only hope that the award will be put into proper perspective when (hopefully) the reprehensible Trump administration crashes and burns into the ignominy it so richly deserves.

If there is any karmic justice in the world, in the future the serendipitous homonymic aspect of Laffer’s surname will provide us with an idiom to describe all devious or crackpot economic theories. Each and every one will be summarily dismissed as “a real Laffer.”

Robert Michael LaCarr, Los Angeles