W. Todd Akin: “Congressman Scalise, I don't know if you were aware of it, but did you ever hear the story of what the Irish did? Their…”

“Congressman Scalise, I don't know if you were aware of it, but did you ever hear the story of what the Irish did? Their economy was in trouble about 15, 20 years ago, and they decided they were going to cut their corporate taxes really to the bone. They really cut the corporate taxes. Now, in America we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. The Irish went the other way, cut their corporate taxes, and their economy took off like a skyrocket. And they've got more businesses starting and jobs, and their Gross Domestic Product has done fantastically. There's a perfect case study of somebody who used this odd principle that by cutting taxes you can actually are increase revenue. Here's a chart of it. You can see we cut the taxes. Everybody said oh, the Republicans have ruined the economy because we cut taxes. But take a look at what happens to revenue. Here is the way I was thinking about this. Tell me where it makes sense to you. Let's say you're king for a day and your job is to put a tax on a loaf of bread. So you start thinking. You say, ``I can put a penny on it. Well then, I'd have to sell a lot of bread to get a bunch of money or I could charge $100 for a loaf of bread, and then maybe nobody would buy any.'' Well, wouldn't commonsense say that there is something between a penny and $100 that's sort of the optimum at which you can tax it? When you increase the tax, you actually get less money.”