Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Laffer

Laffer’s line looks innocuous - almost bureaucratic - but it smuggles in the core move of supply-side economics: the insistence that taxpayers are not passive targets, they’re strategic actors. “Change the timing” is doing a lot of work here. It reframes income not as a fixed stream the state can reliably skim, but as a fluid decision variable. If policy makes one year’s tax bite worse, people and firms don’t only earn less; they delay a bonus, accelerate a sale, shift compensation into stock options, park profits offshore, or simply hold onto assets until the rate drops. The subtext is blunt: government can raise rates on paper and still lose revenue in practice, because behavior reroutes around the rule.

The specificity matters because it’s a quieter, more defensible claim than the cartoon version of the Laffer Curve (“tax cuts always pay for themselves”). Timing effects are real and well-documented, especially for high earners with flexible compensation and capital gains. By focusing on timing rather than total effort, Laffer narrows the argument to a mechanism that doesn’t require a moral story about laziness or enterprise. It’s technocratic persuasion.

Contextually, this fits the late-20th-century pivot toward treating policy as incentives and markets as evasive organisms. It also hints at a political asymmetry: the people most able to “change the timing” are the ones with accountants, assets, and leverage. The quote reads like neutral economics; it doubles as a warning that tax policy is, in practice, a contest between legislation and sophistication.