Greg Mankiw quotes David Stockman quoting Ronald Reagan's parable about high taxes: "You could only make four pictures, and then you were in the top [tax] bracket. . . . So we all quit working after four pictures and went off to the country."
Hmmm. Maybe Reagan's true calling was to be a fitness trainer.
Anyway, Jonathan Bernstein decides to check the facts (apparently at task that neither Mankiw nor the Times were up to*) and runs the numbers by reference to Reagan's imdb page:
1937 - 2
1938 - 9
1939 - 7
1940 - 7
1941 - 4
1942 - 3
1947 - 3
1948 - 0
1949 - 4
1950 - 1
1951 - 4
1952 - 3
The moral of the story, I think, is that we should immediately return to the tax structure of 1948; a tax regime that resulted in zero Ronald Reagan pictures was clearly getting incentives right.
*This is slightly unfair to Mankiw, since the point of quoting Reagan stories is never that they're true, but that they're convenient.
(Via Brad DeLong.)
