Yesterday we celebrated this week’s two big birthdays: America’s 250th and the Big Beautiful Tax Bill’s first – with an event in Washington hosted by Unleash Prosperity and our friends at the America First Policy Institute. One highlight of the day was when Art Laffer presented this stunning chart showing that nearly every increase in the top marginal tax rate has actually lowered the tax take from the top 1%.

This may seem counterintuitive but the facts don’t lie, igher income tax rates have three effects: first, they harm the economy. Second, they reduce the share of taxes paid by the rich, and third, the incomes of the poor go down. So if the goal is to collect more federal revenue: good luck.

The correlation is even easier to see with the tax rate line flipped over, which is how much after-tax income you keep at various tax rates. As Laffer puts it: “People work and invest to earn income, not to pay taxes.”

The clear lesson should be that tax hikes on the rich – now the major policy obsession of most Democrats and even some Republicans – is totally self-defeating if the goal is to actually collect more federal revenue and not just to cause economic damage.