Economist 1, Jonathan Chait 0

A little more on the taxation topic, from Free Exchange at the Economist. It's always nice when the data backs you up.

Seriously, though -- I can't think of reasons why anyone would be surprised by this. Making money is hard -- you have to take risk, or do things like work which you would rather not do. Meanwhile, whatever you did to make money helps somebody else because you've produced something that they wanted (that is, unless you work in government.) If you get less reward for whatever you're doing because of higher taxes, then you're less likely to do it. Admittedly, I'm not an economist, but I don't see why this is complicated. You can argue about how much it happens, but I don't see much of an argument that it happens at least somewhat.