Revenue Cannot Remain at the Historical Average
Posted at 2:36 p.m. on Dec. 6, 2012
Ezra Klein pushes back against the notion that the appropriate level of federal revenues is the historical average of 18% of GDP.
“The average of our past revenue isn’t sufficient to sustain our future. In fact, it wasn’t even enough to support our past… revenue of 18.5 percent of GDP would have been sufficient to balance only three budgets in the past 50 years — all of them in the 1960s.”
“The only balanced budgets of recent history came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when growth was strong and revenue ranged from 19.5 percent of GDP to 20.6 percent.”
