I’ll make this brief, because the graphic below tells most of the story.
Background
Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times. Judging from the polarized commentary he always draws, you either love his columns or hate them. His supporters speculate that he’ll win a nobel prize for economics; his enemies ridicule almost everything he writes as biased, left-wing political bluster. (I have an opinion, but I’ll keep it to myself for now, and just let you decide for yourself.)
Fast forward
Today I was charting the history of tax receipts to see if interest on the debt is becoming the fearful, all-consuming monster a lot of politicians and ideologues are warning us about. (Unsurprisingly, it’s not even close to trending towards monster status. Besides that, they never see fit to reveal the foolproof method for neutralizing interest on the debt. So why do I keep listening to those politicians whenever the subject is economics? That’s a rhetorical question I’ll ponder later, over a beer.)
Anyway, as I was looking at the chart, I remembered a recent post by Jim Glass over at Scrivener.net about Paul Krugman’s desired scenario for USA tax policy. Here’s what Krugman said in Asia Times a couple months ago:
We should be getting 28% of GDP [gross domestic product] in revenue. We are only collecting 17%.
I said to myself, Let’s see what that would look like on this chart. So here it is; click on the chart below to enlarge it. Then decide for yourself which tax policy you'd prefer. 
