When I first started as a Board Tech at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978 (Jimmy Carter)we worked a lot of overtime because we were young and the money was great. After working a few Sundays for “Double Time” we noticed the math was off. So we divided the extra hours by the extra money and determined that we were ending up averaging $3 an hour. Less than half of our regular pay. That was the end of that.
Ask a leftist how to discourage something, like smoking and their second response will be to increase taxes on it (the first will probably be imprisonment). So somewhere in the echo chamber of their heads, leftists realize that when you increase taxes on an activity, that activity will decrease.
Yet at the same time, they believe that if they increase taxes on an activity, the increase in revenues will be proportional to the rate of increase. Then they're surprised when the revenues are far less than they projected, and in some cased, less than they were taking in before the increase.
Heck, even Obama has admitted that he knows that reducing taxes will increase revenues to the government, but he is against it for "fairness."
The best example I ever heard was when a state (I believe it was Illinois) decided to increase the tax rates on casinos. It was "progressive" so as the casinos made more, they paid an increasing tax rate. The casinos realized that if they made more than a certain amount, the higher tax rates made operations less than profitable. So they cut back on the hours that the casinos were operating. Since the entire tax scale had increased, the state did take in a bit more money, though far less than projected... However that was more than offset by the number of people who were laid off or had their hours cut by the casino. The actual revenues to the state were less than before the tax increase.
Mark