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Supply-side economics

Supply-side economics is a macroeconomic theory postulating that economic growth can be most effectively fostered by lowering taxes, decreasing regulation, and allowing free trade. According to supply-side economics theory, consumers will benefit from greater supply of goods and services at lower prices, and employment will increase. Supply-side fiscal policies are designed to increase aggregate supply, as opposed to aggregate demand, thereby expanding output and employment while lowering prices. Such policies are of several general varieties:
 * 1) Investments in human capital, such as education, healthcare, and encouraging the transfer of technologies and business processes, to improve productivity (output per worker). Encouraging globalized free trade via containerization is a major recent example.
 * 2) Tax reduction, to provide incentives to work, invest and take risks. Lowering income tax rates and eliminating or lowering tariffs are examples of such policies.
 * 3) Investments in new capital equipment and research and development (R&D), to further improve productivity. Allowing businesses to depreciate capital equipment more rapidly (e.g., over one year as opposed to 10) gives them an immediate financial incentive to invest in such equipment.
 * 4) Reduction in government regulations, to encourage business formation and expansion.

A basis of supply-side economics is the Laffer curve, a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and government revenue. The Laffer curve suggests that when the tax level is too high, lowering tax rates will boost government revenue through higher economic growth, though the level at which rates are deemed "too high" is disputed. A 2012 poll of leading economists found none agreed that reducing the US federal income tax rate would result in higher annual tax revenue within five years. Critics also argue that several large tax cuts in the United States over the last 40 years have not increased revenue.

The term "supply-side economics" was thought for some time to have been coined by the journalist Jude Wanniski in 1975; according to Robert D. Atkinson, the term "supply side" was first used in 1976 by Herbert Stein (a former economic adviser to President Richard Nixon) and only later that year was this term repeated by Jude Wanniski. The term alludes to ideas of the economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer.

Historical origins
Supply-side economics developed in response to the stagflation of the 1970s. It drew on a range of non-Keynesian economic thought, including the Chicago School and New Classical School. Bruce Bartlett, an advocate of supply-side economics, traced the school of thought's intellectual descent from the philosophers Ibn Khaldun and David Hume, satirist Jonathan Swift, political economist Adam Smith and United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.

Bartlett stated in 2007 that

"Today, hardly any economist believes what the Keynesians believed in the 1970s and most accept the basic ideas of supply-side economics – that incentives matter, that high tax rates are bad for growth, and that inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon. Consequently, there is no longer any meaningful difference between supply-side economics and mainstream economics.

...

Today, supply-side economics has become associated with an obsession for cutting taxes under any and all circumstances. No longer do its advocates in Congress and elsewhere confine themselves to cutting marginal tax rates – the tax on each additional dollar earned – as the original supply-siders did. Rather, they support even the most gimmicky, economically dubious tax cuts with the same intensity. ... today it is common to hear tax cutters claim, implausibly, that all tax cuts raise revenue."

Current day advocates of supply-side economic policies claim that lower tax rates produce macroeconomic benefits and emphasize this benefit rather than their traditional ideological Classical liberals opposition to taxation because they opposed government in general. Their traditional claim was that each man had a right to himself and his property and therefore taxation was immoral and of questionable legal grounding. On the other hand, supply-side economists argued that the alleged collective benefit (i.e. increased economic output and efficiency) provided the main impetus for tax cuts.

As in classical economics, supply-side economics proposed that production or supply is the key to economic prosperity and that consumption or demand is merely a secondary consequence. Early on, this idea had been summarized in Say's Law of Markets, which states: "A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." or, in other words, production (supply) must first occur to enable economic activity or trade.

Supply-side economics rose in popularity among Republican Party politicians from 1977 onwards. Prior to 1977, Republicans were more split on tax reduction, with some worrying that tax cuts would fuel inflation and exacerbate deficits.

In 1978, Jude Wanniski published The Way the World Works in which he laid out the central thesis of supply-side economics and detailed the failure of high tax rate progressive income tax systems and United States monetary policy under Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. Wanniski advocated lower tax rates and a return to some kind of gold standard, similar to the 1944–1971 Bretton Woods System that Nixon abandoned.

Definition and principles

James D. Gwartney and Richard L. Stroup provide a definition of supply-side economics as the belief that adjustments in marginal tax rates have significant effects on the total supply. Gwartney and Stroup said "that the supply-side argument provided the foundation for the Reagan tax policy, which led to significant reductions in marginal tax rates in the United States during the 1980s".

Barry P. Bosworth has provided another definition by presenting the supply-side economics from two perspectives:

 * 1) "A broad interest in the determinants of aggregate supply – the volume and quality of the capital and labor inputs and the efficiency with which they are used"
 * 2) "A narrower focus on tax reductions as a means of increasing the supply of savings, investment, and labor."

Supply-side vs. previous approaches to economic policy
Supply-side economics has originated as an alternative to Keynesian economics, which focused macroeconomic policy on management of final demand. Demand-side economics relies on a fixed-price view of the economy, where the demand plays a key role in defining the future supply growth, which also allows for incentive implications of investment.

The Keynesian policy approaches focus on demand management as a major instrument to affect aggregate production and GNP, while Monetarism focuses on management of monetary aggregates and credit. Unlike supply-side economics, demand-side economics is based on the assumption that increases in GNP result from increased spending.

Traditional policy approaches were challenged by the theory of supply-side economics in the Reagan Administration of the 1980s. It claims that fiscal policy may lead to changes in supply as well as in demand. So, when marginal tax rates are high, consumers pursue additional leisure and current consumption instead of pursuing current income and extra income in the future. Therefore, there is a decline in work effort and investment, which in turn causes a decrease of production and GNP, regardless of the total demand levels.

On these assumptions, supply side economists formulate the idea that a cut in marginal tax rates has a positive effect on economic growth.

Role of the marginal tax rates
The main focus of supply-side economics is promotion of economic growth. In this regard, some studies have suggested to consider two relative prices.

The first one influences decisions of individuals on the distribution of their income between consumption and savings. The cost of individual's decision to assign a unit of income to either consumption or savings is a future value of the unit, which has been given up by choosing either to consume or to save. The unit of income value is defined by the marginal tax rates. Therefore, higher tax rates would decrease the cost of consumption, which would cause a fall in investment and savings. At the same time, lower tax rates would cause the investment and savings levels to rise, while the consumption levels would fall.

The second price influences decisions of individuals on the distribution of their time between work and leisure. The cost of individual's decision to allocate a unit of time either to work or leisure stands for current income, which was given up by choosing either work or leisure. The cost also includes the future income, which was given up for leisure instead of enhancing the professional skills. The value of lost income is defined by the tax rate assigned to the additional income. Therefore, the increase in marginal tax rates leads to a decrease in the price of leisure. However, if the marginal tax rate decline, the cost of leisure increases.

Both the amount of retained and taxed income is determined by the marginal tax rate. That is why, from a supply-side economist's standpoint, marginal tax rates play a significant role in determining the development of the economy. Due to crucial role in determining how much time workers will spend on work and leisure or how much income will be spent on consumption and for savings, supply-side economists insist on decreasing tax rates as they believe it could improve the growth rates of the economy.

Laffer curve
Laffer curve illustrates a mathematical relationship between tax revenues and tax rates, which was popularized by economist Arthur B. Laffer in 1974. The Laffer Curve posits the existence of a maximum point when tax revenue is maximized at a specific (unknown) tax rate. Many interpret the Laffer Curve as higher tax rates can sometimes decrease the tax base, which will lead to the decrease in tax revenues even if the tax rates are high. Due to the effect exerted by taxes on the taxed income, the adjustment of tax rates may not lead to proportional changes in tax revenues. That is why, some supply-side economists insist decreasing high tax rates can result in an increase of tax revenues.

The Laffer curve embodies a postulate of supply-side economics: that tax rates and tax revenues are distinct, with government tax revenues the same at a 100% tax rate as they are at a 0% tax rate and maximum revenue somewhere in between these two values. Supply-siders argued that in a high tax rate environment lowering tax rates would result in either increased revenues or smaller revenue losses than one would expect relying on only static estimates of the previous tax base.

This led supply-siders to advocate large reductions in marginal income and capital gains tax rates to encourage greater investment, which would produce more supply. Jude Wanniski and many others advocate a zero capital gains rate.

Reaganomics
In the United States, commentators frequently equate supply-side economics with Reaganomics. The administration of Republican president Ronald Reagan promoted its fiscal policies as being based on supply-side economics. Reagan made supply-side economics a household phrase and promised an across-the-board reduction in income tax rates and an even larger reduction in capital gains tax rates. During Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, the key economic concern was double digit inflation, which Reagan described as "[t]oo many dollars chasing too few goods", but rather than the usual dose of tight money, recession and layoffs, with their consequent loss of production and wealth, he promised a gradual and painless way to fight inflation by "producing our way out of it".

Switching from earlier monetary policy, Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker implemented tighter monetary policies including lower money supply growth to break the inflationary psychology and squeeze inflationary expectations out of the economic system. Therefore, supply-side supporters argue that Reaganomics was only partially based on supply-side economics.

Congress under Reagan passed a plan that would slash taxes by $749 billion over five years. Critics claim that the tax cuts increased budget deficits while Reagan supporters credit them with helping the 1980s economic expansion and argued that the budget deficit would have decreased if not for massive increases in military spending. As a result, Jason Hymowitz cited Reagan—along with Jack Kemp—as a great advocate for supply-side economics in politics and repeatedly praised his leadership.

Critics of Reaganomics claim it failed to produce much of the exaggerated gains some supply-siders had promised. Paul Krugman later summarized the situation: "When Ronald Reagan was elected, the supply-siders got a chance to try out their ideas. Unfortunately, they failed." Although he credited supply-side economics for being more successful than monetarism which he claimed "left the economy in ruins", he stated that supply-side economics produced results which fell "so far short of what it promised", describing the supply-side theory as "free lunches".

Clinton years

Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 into law, which raised income taxes rates on incomes above $115,000, created additional higher tax brackets for corporate income over $335,000, removed the cap on Medicare taxes, raised fuel taxes and increased the portion of Social Security income subject to tax, among other tax increases. Frankel and Orszag described the "progressive fiscal conservatism" of the 1993 package: "Such progressive fiscal conservatism combines modest attempts at redistribution (the progressive component) and budget discipline (the fiscal conservative component). Thus the 1993 package included significant spending reductions and tax increases. But it concentrated the tax increases on upper-income taxpayers, while substantially expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, Head Start, and other government programs aimed at lower earners." The tax increases led to greater revenue (relative to a baseline without a tax increase).

The bill was strongly opposed by Republicans, vigorously attacked by John Kasich and Minority Whip Newt Gingrich as destined to cause job losses and lower revenue.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote in 2017 that Clinton's tax increases on the rich provided counter-example to the supply-side tax cut doctrine: "Bill Clinton provided a clear test, by raising taxes on the rich. Republicans predicted disaster, but instead the economy boomed, creating more jobs than under Reagan."

Supply-side economist Alan Reynolds argued that the Clinton era represented a continuation of a low tax policy (from the 1980s):"In reality, tax policy was not unambiguously better in the eighties than in the nineties. The highest income tax rate was 50 percent from 1983 to 1986, but below 40 percent after 1993. And the capital gains tax was 28 percent from 1987 to [1997], but only 20 percent in the booming years of 1997-2000. On balance, there were good and bad things about both periods. But both the eighties and the nineties had much wiser tax policies than we had from 1968 to 1982."

Kansas experiment
In May 2012, Sam Brownback, Governor of the state of Kansas, signed into law the "Kansas Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117", which cut the number of individual income tax brackets from three to two, and cut the top income tax rates from 6.45% and 6.25% to 4.9% and the bottom rate from 3.5% to 3%. It also eliminated the 7% tax on "pass-through" income, income that businesses — such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies, and subchapter S corporations — pass on to their owners instead of paying corporate income tax on, for the owners of almost 200,000 businesses The law cut taxes by US$231 million in its first year, and cuts were projected to increase to US$934 million annually after six years.

The cuts were based on model legislation published by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and were supported by The Wall Street Journal, supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, economics commentator Stephen Moore and anti-tax leader Grover Norquist. The tax cuts have been called the "Kansas experiment", and was described by the Brookings Institution as "one of the cleanest experiments for how tax cuts effect economic growth in the U.S."

Brownback compared his tax cut policies with those of Ronald Reagan, but also described them as "a real live experiment ... We'll see how it works.", Brownback forecast his cuts would create an additional 23,000 jobs in Kansas by 2020, and was intended to generate rapid economic growth, which he said would be "like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy." On the other hand, the Kansas Legislature's research staff warned of the possibility of a deficit of nearly US$2.5 billion by July 2018.

By 2017, state revenues had fallen by hundreds of millions of dollars causing spending on roads, bridges, and education to be slashed, but instead of boosting economic growth, growth in Kansas remained consistently below average. A working paper by two economists at Oklahoma State University (Dan Rickman and Hongbo Wang) using historical data from several other states with economies structured similarly to Kansas found that the Kansas economy grew about 7.8% less and employment about 2.6% less than it would have had Brownback not cut taxes. In 2017, the Republican Legislature of Kansas voted to roll back the cuts, and after Brownback vetoed the repeal, overrode his veto.

According to Max Ehrenfreund, economists generally agree that an explanation for the reduction instead of increase in economic growth from the tax cuts is that "any" benefits from tax cuts come over the long, not short run, but what does come in the short run is a major decline in demand for goods and services. In the Kansas economy cuts in state government expenditures cut incomes of state government "employees, suppliers and contractors" who spent much or most of their incomes locally. In addition, concern over the state's large budget deficits "might have deterred businesses from making major new investments".

One problem Kansas encountered is that while studies have shown that tax cuts increase economic growth, the increased revenue from that growth at the new lower tax rates are only enough to make up for 10-30% of the tax cuts, meaning that to avoid deficits, spending cuts must also be made.

Trump years
Supply-side advocates Laffer and economics commentators Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow played prominent roles in formulating Trump's economic policies by advising him on his tax cut, as well as encouraging him to lower trade barriers. Laffer and Moore wrote a 2018 book about the policy, Trumponomics, with a foreword by Kudlow. Economist Gregory Mankiw reviewed the book in Foreign Affairs, and characterized the statements around Trump's policies as "snake-oil economics". He criticized the authors for un-apologetically parroting the president's claimed annual growth rates spawned by his tax cut to be 1-4%, when the highest reasonable estimates were around 0.5%, but also credits them for continuing to support the consensus view that free trade is good for all, against the president's mercantilist views. He also criticized them for following a simplistic "economic growth will solve all problems" approach, when previous presidential economic advisors had been more nuanced, recognizing the unavoidable tradeoff between equity and efficiency in their approaches to managing the economy.

Trump implemented individual and corporate income tax cuts which took effect in 2018. Rutgers economics professor Farrokh Langdana claimed that the Trump tax cuts were an example of supply-side tax policy, citing a letter from economists long-associated with the supply-side theory describing them as such.

Fiscal policy theory
One benefit of a supply-side policy is that shifting the aggregate supply curve outward means prices can be lowered along with expanding output and employment. This is in contrast to demand-side policies (e.g., higher government spending), which even if successful tend to create inflationary pressures (i.e., raise the aggregate price level) as the aggregate demand curve shifts outward. Infrastructure investment is an example of a policy that has both demand-side and supply-side elements.

Supply-side economics holds that increased taxation steadily reduces economic activity within a nation and discourages investment. Taxes act as a type of trade barrier or tariff that causes economic participants to revert to less efficient means of satisfying their needs. As such, higher taxation leads to lower levels of specialization and lower economic efficiency. The idea is said to be illustrated by the Laffer curve.

Supply-side economists have less to say on the effects of deficits and sometimes cite Robert Barro's work that states that rational economic actors will buy bonds in sufficient quantities to reduce long-term interest rates.

Effect on economic growth and tax revenues
Bruce Bartlett stated in 2007 that "The original supply-siders suggested that some tax cuts, under very special circumstances, might actually raise federal revenues. ... But today it is common to hear tax cutters claim, implausibly, that all tax cuts raise revenue."

Some contemporary economists do not consider supply-side economics a tenable economic theory, with Alan Blinder calling it an "ill-fated" and perhaps "silly" school on the pages of a 2006 textbook. Greg Mankiw, former chairman of President President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, offered similarly sharp criticism of the school in the early editions of his introductory economics textbook. "Tax cuts rarely pay for themselves. My reading of the academic literature leads me to believe that about one-third of the cost of a typical tax cut is recouped with faster economic growth."

In a 1992 article for the Harvard International Review, James Tobin wrote: "The 'Laffer curve' idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule."

Karl Case and Ray Fair wrote in Principles of Economics, "The extreme promises of supply-side economics did not materialize. President Reagan argued that because of the effect depicted in the Laffer curve, the government could maintain expenditures, cut tax rates, and balance the budget. This was not the case. Government revenues fell sharply from levels that would have been realized without the tax cuts."

Supply side proponents Trabandt and Uhlig argue that "static scoring overestimates the revenue loss for labor and capital tax cuts" and that "dynamic scoring" is a better predictor for the effects of tax cuts.

A 1999 study by University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee examined major changes in high-income tax rates in the United States from the 1920s onwards. It concluded that there were only modest changes in the reported income of high-income individuals, indicating that the tax changes had little effect on how much people work. He concluded that the notion that governments could raise more money by cutting rates "is unlikely to be true at anything like today's marginal tax rates." In 2015, one study found that in the past several decades, tax cuts in the U.S. seldom recouped revenue losses and had minimal impact on GDP growth.

A 2008 working paper found that in the case of Russia, "tax rate cuts can increase revenues by improving tax compliance."

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics reports that estimates of revenue-maximizing tax rates have varied widely, with a mid-range of around 70%. According to a 2012 study, "the U.S. marginal top [tax] rate is far from the top of the Laffer curve." A 2012 survey found a consensus among leading economists that reducing the US federal income tax rate would raise GDP but would not increase tax revenue.

John Quiggin distinguishes between the Laffer curve and Laffer's analysis of tax rates. The Laffer curve was "correct but unoriginal", but Laffer's analysis that the United States was on the wrong side of the Laffer curve "was original but incorrect."

1920s tax cuts
Proponents of supply-side economics have sometimes cited tax cuts enacted in the 1920s as evidence that tax cuts can increase tax revenue. After World War I, the highest tax bracket, which was for those earning over $100,000 a year (worth at least $1 million a year now), was over 70 percent. According to The Heritage Foundation, revenue acts of 1921, 1924 and 1926 reduced this tax rate to less than 25 percent, yet tax revenues actually went up significantly. Tax historian Joseph Thorndike argues that the tax cuts helped "bolster" growth but did not "cover the full cost of those tax cuts".

Revenue Act of 1964
Proponents of supply-side economics sometimes cite tax cuts enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson with the Revenue Act of 1964. John F. Kennedy had the year prior advocated a drastic tax-rate cut in 1963 when the top income tax rate was 91%, arguing that "[t]ax rates are too high today and tax revenues too low, and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now". The CBO concluded in 1978 that the tax cuts reduced tax revenue by $12 billion and that only between $3 billion to $9 billion were recaptured due to bolstered economic growth. According to the CBO, "most of this rise [in revenues] was due to economic growth that would have taken place even without the tax cut."

At the same time, some studies have found a relatively robust response to tax cuts from the top 5% of tax returns. There has been identified an increase of 7.7% in revenues from the top 5%, from $17.17 billion US in 1963 to $18.49 billion in 1965. Hereby, the data have provided evidence that the group has been in the prohibitive part of the Laffer curve, because its input to total tax revenues have increased despite the tax rates decreasing significantly.

Reaganomics
Supply-siders justified Reagan's tax cuts during the 1980s by claiming they would result in net increases in tax revenue, yet tax revenues declined (relative to a baseline without the cuts) due to Reagan's tax cuts, and the deficit ballooned during Reagan's term in office. The Treasury Department studied the Reagan tax cuts and concluded they significantly reduced tax revenues relative to a baseline without them. The 1990 budget by the Reagan administration concluded that the 1981 tax cuts had caused a reduction in tax revenue.

Both CBO and the Reagan Administration forecast that individual and business income tax revenues would be lower if the Reagan tax cut proposals were implemented, relative to a policy baseline without those cuts, by about $50 billion in 1982 and $210 billion by 1986. FICA tax revenue increased because in 1983 FICA tax rates were increased from 6.7% to 7% and the ceiling was raised by $2,100. For the self-employed, the FICA tax rate went from 9.35% to 14%. The FICA tax rate increased throughout Reagan's term and rose to 7.51% in 1988 and the ceiling was raised by 61% through Reagan's two terms. Those tax hikes on wage earners, along with inflation, were the source of revenue gains in the early 1980s.

It has been contended by some supply-side critics that the argument to lower taxes to increase revenues was a smokescreen for "starving" the government of revenues in the hope that the tax cuts would lead to a corresponding drop in government spending, but this did not turn out to be the case. Paul Samuelson called this notion "the tape worm theory—the idea that the way to get rid of a tape worm is [to] stab your patient in the stomach".

There is frequent confusion on the meaning of the term "supply-side economics" between the related ideas of the existence of the Laffer Curve and the belief that decreasing tax rates can increase tax revenues. Many supply-side economists doubt the latter claim while still supporting the general policy of tax cuts. Economist Gregory Mankiw used the term "fad economics" to describe the notion of tax rate cuts increasing revenue in the third edition of his 2007 Principles of Macroeconomics textbook in a section entitled "Charlatans and Cranks": "An example of fad economics occurred in 1980, when a small group of economists advised Presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue. They argued that if people could keep a higher fraction of their income, people would work harder to earn more income. Even though tax rates would be lower, income would rise by so much, they claimed, that tax revenues would rise. Almost all professional economists, including most of those who supported Reagan's proposal to cut taxes, viewed this outcome as far too optimistic. Lower tax rates might encourage people to work harder and this extra effort would offset the direct effects of lower tax rates to some extent, but there was no credible evidence that work effort would rise by enough to cause tax revenues to rise in the face of lower tax rates. [...] People on fad diets put their health at risk but rarely achieve the permanent weight loss they desire. Similarly, when politicians rely on the advice of charlatans and cranks, they rarely get the desirable results they anticipate. After Reagan's election, Congress passed the cut in tax rates that Reagan advocated, but the tax cut did not cause tax revenues to rise."

In 1986, Martin Feldstein — a self-described "traditional supply sider" who served as Reagan's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 1982 to 1984 — characterized the "new supply siders" who emerged circa 1980:

"What distinguished the new supply siders from the traditional supply siders as the 1980s began was not the policies they advocated but the claims that they made for those policies ... The 'new' supply siders were much more extravagant in their claims. They projected rapid growth, dramatic increases in tax revenue, a sharp rise in saving, and a relatively painless reduction in inflation. The height of supply side hyperbole was the 'Laffer curve' proposition that the tax cut would actually increase tax revenue because it would unleash an enormously depressed supply of effort. Another remarkable proposition was the claim that even if the tax cuts did lead to an increased budget deficit, that would not reduce the funds available for investment in plant and equipment because tax changes would raise the saving rate by enough to finance the increased deficit ... Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the loose talk of the supply side extremists gave fundamentally good policies a bad name and led to quantitative mistakes that not only contributed to subsequent budget deficits but that also made it more difficult to modify policy when those deficits became apparent."

Bush tax cuts
During his presidency, President Bush signed the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, which entailed significant tax cuts. In 2003, the Congressional Budget Office conducted a dynamic scoring analysis of tax cuts advocated by supply advocates, and found that the Bush tax cuts would not pay for themselves. Two of the nine models used in the study predicted a large improvement in the deficit over the next ten years resulting from tax cuts, but only by making the assumption that people would work harder from 2004 to 2014 because they believed that tax rates would increase again in 2014, and they wanted to make more money before the tax cuts expired.

In 2006, the CBO released a study titled "A Dynamic Analysis of Permanent Extension of the President's Tax Relief". This study found that under the best possible scenario making tax cuts permanent would increase the economy "over the long run" by 0.7%. This study was criticized by many economists, including Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw, who pointed out that the CBO used a very low value for the earnings-weighted compensated labor supply elasticity of 0.14. In a paper published in the Journal of Public Economics, Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl noted that the current economics research would place an appropriate value for labor supply elasticity at around 0.5.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that extending the Bush tax cuts beyond their 2010 expiration would increase the deficit by $1.8 trillion over 10 years. The CBO also completed a study in 2005 analyzing a hypothetical 10% income tax cut and concluded that under various scenarios there would be minimal offsets to the loss of revenue. In other words, deficits would increase by nearly the same amount as the tax cut in the first five years with limited feedback revenue thereafter.

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman agreed the tax cuts would reduce tax revenues and result in intolerable deficits, though he supported them as a means to restrain federal spending. Friedman characterized the reduced government tax revenue as "cutting their allowance".

Douglas Holtz-Eakin was a Bush administration economist who was appointed director of the Congressional Budget Office in 2003. Under his leadership, the CBO undertook a study of income tax rates which found that any new revenue from tax cuts paled in comparison to their cost.

Dartmouth economics professor Andrew Samwick was the chief staff economist for the Bush Council of Economic Advisers from July 2003 to July 2004. Writing on his blog in 2007, Samwick urged his former colleagues in the Bush administration to avoid asserting that the Bush tax cuts paid for themselves, because "No thoughtful person believes it...Not a single one."

Trump tax cuts
The New York Times reported in November 2018 that the Trump tax overhaul "has fattened the paychecks of most American workers, padded the profits of large corporations and sped economic growth." Cautioning that "its still early but ten months after the law took effect, the promised 'supply side' bump is harder to find than the sugar-high stimulus." The writers explained that "It's highly unusual for deficits...to grow this much during periods of prosperity" and that "the fiscal health of the U.S. is deteriorating fast, as revenues have declined sharply" (nearly $200 billion or about 6%) relative to the CBO forecast prior to the tax cuts. Results for 2018 included:
 * Contrary to claims the tax cuts would pay for themselves, the budget deficit rose to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018, up 17% versus the prior year.
 * Corporate tax revenues were down by one-third in fiscal year 2018.
 * Stock buyback activity increased significantly.
 * GDP growth, business investment and corporate profits increased.
 * A typical worker in a large company got a $225 raise or one-time bonus, due to the law.
 * Real wage growth (adjusted for inflation) was slightly slower in 2018 than 2017.

Analysis conducted by the Congressional Research Service on the first-year effect of the tax cut found that little if any economic growth in 2018 could be attributed to it. Growth in GDP, employment, worker compensation and business investment slowed during the second year following enactment of the tax cut, prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following the Trump tax cut, top White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow falsely asserted that federal revenues had increased about 10% since the tax cut, though they had actually declined. He also falsely asserted that the CBO had found the "entire $1.5 trillion tax cut is virtually paid for by higher revenues and better nominal GDP."

China's Supply-side Structural Reform
Beginning in 2012, China's economic performance entered a "new normal," in which the growth of the economy slowed to a medium pace for the first time since the broad economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping. In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced supply-side structural reforms (SSSR) in 2015 in an effort to combat the slowing economic growth, moving away from the export-oriented economy and toward supply and production driven growth. The focus of the reforms correspond to increase in total factor productivity (TFP) through an increase in investment in technological improvements as a replacement for the labor and capital-intensive emphasis of the previous growth model. China's supply-side structural reforms focus on the reduction of excess capacity across various economic sectors. The reform plan centers around four key areas: cutting excess industrial capacity, reducing leverage in the corporate sector, reducing stock of property inventories, and lowering costs for new enterprises. The former two areas corresponds to short-term initiatives related to the state-owned sectors, while the former initiatives correspond to longer-term solutions within the private sector. Cutting excess industrial capacity focuses heavily on sectors like coal, steel, and electricity generation. The targets for coal production reductions implemented by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) amounted to 250 million tonnes per annum (Mta) in 2016 as well as a 100-150 Mta reduction in steel production capacity over a five-year period. The result in the steel industry was more pricing power for the remaining large firms, as well as higher profits due to the increase in price. The increase in profits due to excess capacity reductions has also led to an increased capacity of firms to settle outstanding debts and reduce leverage, part of the second pillar of China's SSSR. As part of the deleveraging initiative, the government also encouraged mergers and acquisitions, direct financing, and debt-to-equity swaps, resulting in the stabilization of corporate debt to GDP ratio. Additional reforms include increased incentives for private sector investment, development of modern service industries, and increasing public goods and services supply. The longer-term initiatives have also been accompanied by large-scale tax cuts as well as a transition from business tax to value-added tax (VAT) which produced positive results for service industry growth. Policies targeted toward new growth engine creation include Made in China 2025 and the Internet Plus agenda, both of which have been attributed in part to the rapid growth of China's industrial and innovation competitiveness. China's supply-side structural reforms are ongoing and oriented toward the long term. The adjustments to the industrial sector as a result of the early reform policies have been attributed to a nominal increase in GDP growth. However, the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted demand growth in China's domestic consumer market, which has slowed the effects of continued supply-side reforms.

Housing supply and prices
Increasing the supply of housing is a way to drive down prices, in contrast to demand-side economics which believes in subsidizing buyers or reducing demand with tight monetary policy.

Criticism
Critics of supply-side policies emphasize the growing federal deficits, increased income inequality and lack of growth. They argue that the Laffer curve only measures the rate of taxation, not tax incidence, which may be a stronger predictor of whether a tax code change is stimulative or dampening.

Writing in 2010, John Quiggin said, "To the extent that there was an economic response to the Reagan tax cuts, and to those of George W. Bush twenty years later, it seems largely to have been a Keynesian demand-side response, to be expected when governments provide households with additional net income in the context of a depressed economy."

Cutting marginal tax rates can also be perceived as primarily beneficial to the wealthy, which some see as politically rather than economically motivated:

"Back in 1980 George H. W. Bush famously described supply-side economics — the claim that cutting taxes on rich people will conjure up an economic miracle, so much so that revenues will actually rise — as 'voodoo economic policy.' Yet it soon became the official doctrine of the Republican Party, and still is. That shows an impressive level of commitment. But what makes this commitment even more impressive is that it's a doctrine that has been tested again and again — and has failed every time...In other words, supply-side economics is a classic example of a zombie doctrine: a view that should have been killed by the evidence long ago, but just keeps shambling along, eating politicians' brains. — Paul Krugman"

"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows. — John Kenneth Galbraith"Studies, which have analysed the tax cuts in 2001 (EGTRRA), provided controversial conclusions: the decrease in taxes have provided a generally positive impact on the future output from the effect of the lower tax rates on human capital accumulation, private saving and investment, labor supply; however, the tax cuts have produced adverse effects such as higher deficits and reduced national savings. Thus, Gale and Potter (2002) concluded that these tax cuts could not affect the GDP levels in any significant way in the next 10 years.

title: Supply-side economics


text:
Talk:Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork

Lookalike
is there any rumour of relatedness to shakespeare?213.106.120.242 (talk) 10:42, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Untitled
What's an escheator? -- Zoe

 * When someone dies without any heir to inherit their property, it "escheats" to the government. The "escheator" was the county officer appointed in England to make sure the king got all that property. -- isis 07:38 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

The rehabilitation issue, when The Great Earl is compared with Hobbes, is difficult. Hobbes has attracted much recent biographical study. The Great Earl has not, although his son Robert Boyle has attracted very substantial attention from the likes of Hunter, Schapin, Wojcik, Principe and many others.

Does anyone know of any comparatively recent work which locates The Earl more comprehensively in the context of his involvement with the events (especially political) of his time?

Where, for instance, are the details of his demise?

This may all seem somewhat churlish, bearing in mind that the Wikipedia entry for this individual is by far the most comprehensive of any encyclopedia entry for the man.

It is not churlish at all, but a fair question. I don't know the answer but hopefully someone out there might know. STÓD/ÉÍRE 23:49 Apr 11, 2003 (UTC)

Well, in the interests of answering the question (and hopefully others) I went out and at great expense BOUGHT a (100 year old, 531 pages) edition of the Dorothea Townshend Biography.

On page 441 of her book:

"When he learned the will of the King, he said no word; he turned his face to the wall, and died."

There is a footnote reference at the end of that sentence wich says:

Borlaise, Red. Ire., p209.

I will research the reference, but so far I haven't found further details in Townshend's (fascinating) book, so the precise account of the great Earl's demise remains a mystery (to Wikipedia, at least).

Ericross

Historical Context Section is Nonsense
Firstly, it's obviously very pro-Boyle and therefore not NPOV. Secondly, *most* of it doesn't even make any sense whatsoever - e.g. the second sentence of the first paragraph - this is utter gibberish; the reference to the "strategic use" of marriage with a link to the Queen Mother's ancestry - this is a non-sequitur... I mean, what? The Earl "strategically" planned that 400 years into the future one of his descendants would marry a future king in purely in order secure his "immortality". Riiiiight. 195.194.199.50 15:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

The comments above are quite important and do need to be addressed
Although the 'pro-Boyle' history is not easy to find elsewhere, the writer above has an excellent point:

The 'anti-Boyle sentiment' is even harder to find, and is conspicuopus by its absence!

This article, which may indeed give the impression that Boyle may be in need of rehabilitation, was really intended by me when I wrote it to convey the more pressing need for Boyle to be re-examined as an under-researched historical figure, whose history seems to be less comprehensively documented than it probably was.

Nicholas Canny's book seems to allude to it, but I couldn't actually find any direct references to it.

The 'pro-Boyle' aspect of the article is really a 'counterbalance', not to 'anti-Boyle' material, but to what appears to be an 'airbrushed out from history'sense, a sense where 'Boyle is an untold story'.

The 'bad stuff', whereby whatever it was that constitutes the case against Boyle can be presented, will no doubt 'couterbalance the counterbalance' and give us an insight into the following:

What Boyle did that was most offensive

What the reaction was at the time

Who wrote about it

How accurate such accounts might be

What the response was to such material at the time

Why such material seems to be inacessible at the moment

By the way, the illustration of the 'permeation' of the royal succession by Boyle's descendants is not meant to create an impression of supernatural power, merely to point out that his manifest intention (much resented by his detractors) which was to elevate future generations of his offspring into the uppermost echelons of the aristocracy, could not be realistically seen as being ultimately inconsistent with reality.

There is nothing unprecedented regarding such an outcome, setting in train arrangements which 'span the generations' is at the very heart of the 'dynastic ethos' which underlies the principle of aristocracy.

What was exceptional was the conceived principle and succesful practice by Boyle of subverting the established order by engineering one's own position (rather than inheriting it) in the dynastic process and then making a special effort (using money and marriage) to maximise the extent and rapdity which ones family penetrates and proliferates within the hierarchy.

The alarm this caused in the aristocracy does leave some distinct traces (Canny's title "the upstart Earl" was Boyle's nickname).

My own suspicion is that Boyle was widely despised both during and after his time.

It is true to say that the current article offers too little insight as to why.

Perhaps the above writer can share his own.

Cleanup
The following changes were made to address confusion and POV/NPOV

Split up and simplified first paragraph of historical context and added at the end of what is now the second paragraph:

"rather than offering an objective appreciation of him as a historical phenomenon."

Qualified the claim concerning "marriage into the Royal line":

"achievement" (as one who aimed at "rising to power by successfullly permeating the aristocratic hierarchy" would inevitably see it).

Added the following at the bottom of historical context:

"If one wishes to understand the forces which have mostly "airbrushed" (or more accurately,"failed to paint a comprehensive or comprehensible picture of) the Earl from the cannon of historical literature, one needs to recognise a number of understandable causes resentment towards him."

"His shameless pursuit and acquisition of wealth, power, social elevation and titles, was a practice which, whilst by no means foreign to the aristocracy of the time, was most abhorred by rich and poor alike when it was conducted with success by an upstart, someone without the historical bloodline which was seen at the time as the legitimate basis for power."

"Oliver Cromwell was another relevant contemporary example of how the power of historically descended aristocracy was beginning to change (i.e., lose its exclusive grip on power, although in different ways, Cromwell was a general and Boyle was a businessman) in Boyle's lifetime, although Cromwell's elevation to the very top of the political hierarchy ensured that literature was 'kinder' to Cromwell than it was to Boyle, at least in terms of "depth of coverage"."

"The fact that Boyle was to so many an outsider in the territory he sought to control was itself further reinforcement for such resentments."

"It would not be unrealistic to view Boyle being characterised historically as an "unspeakably notorious rogue", mostly on account of his financial success and the succession of "suspiciously good outcomes" which seem to accompany all but the very last of the challenges presented by his many adversaries."

"Nonetheless, in the context of the cirumstances in which he found himself, his opportunistic successes do draw admiration in some quarters."

 * Why has no-one signed the comments above? I am of the opinion that the personal opinions (do we know whose they are?) in the article have no place in an encyclopaedia. Such views may well surface during a class at university but they would not appear in, say, Britannica without serious back-up. The fact remains that Boyle's century was one of corruption throughout the British Isles and the majority of extant Scottish peerages date from the 17th century. To suggest he was somehow poor and a "rags to riches" story is hardly accurate as his family were landed and had sufficient funds to send him to an excellent private school, and he was later training for the law, something which then required money and influence. Most of Ireland was terribly poor at the time and you would not need to have much money to be regarded as 'comfortable' as a stepping stone to better things. As for marrying well, this is hardly unique to him! My suggestion is that envy is apparent in every century towards those who have done well for themselves. In the 19th and 20th centuries it was represented by the socialists. I'd get rid of all the pathetic waffle and just leave in the facts. David Lauder 17:55, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

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Move page
Should this page be titled "Richard Boyle", and just link the the Earl of Cork page? Xx78900 (talk) 18:09, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork


text:
Chicxulub crater

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo (not the larger coastal town of Chicxulub Puerto). It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when an asteroid, about 10 km in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be 200 km in diameter and 20 km in depth. It is believed to be the second largest impact structure on Earth, and the only one whose peak ring is intact and directly accessible for scientific research.

The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Penfield was initially unable to obtain evidence that the geological feature was a crater and gave up his search. Later, through contact with Alan R. Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the crater's impact origin includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas.

The date of the impact coincides with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the K–Pg or K–T boundary). It is now widely accepted that the devastation and climate disruption resulting from the impact was the primary cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

Discovery
In the late 1970s, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luis Walter Alvarez, put forth their theory that the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was caused by an impact event. The main evidence of such an impact was contained in a thin layer of clay present in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) in Gubbio, Italy. The Alvarezes and colleagues reported that it contained an abnormally high concentration of iridium, a chemical element rare on Earth but common in asteroids. Iridium levels in this layer were as much as 160 times above the background level. It was hypothesized that the iridium was spread into the atmosphere when the impactor was vaporized and settled across Earth's surface among other material thrown up by the impact, producing the layer of iridium-enriched clay. At the time, there was no consensus on what caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction and the boundary layer, with theories including a nearby supernova, climate change, or a geomagnetic reversal. The Alvarezes' impact hypothesis was rejected by many paleontologists, who believed that the lack of fossils found close to the K–Pg boundary—the "three-meter problem"—suggested a more gradual die-off of fossil species.

The Alvarezes, joined by Frank Asaro and Helen Michel from University of California, Berkeley, published their paper on the iridium anomaly in Science in June 1980. Almost simultaneously Jan Smit and Jan Hertogen published their iridium findings from Caravaca, Spain in Nature in May 1980. These papers were followed by other reports of similar iridium spikes at the K–Pg boundary across the globe, and sparked wide interest in the cause of the K–Pg extinction; over 2,000 papers were published in the 1980s on the topic. There were no known impact craters that were the right age and size, spurring a search for a suitable candidate. Recognizing the scope of the work, Lee Hunt and Lee Silver organized a cross-discipline meeting in Snowbird, Utah, in 1981. Unknown to them, evidence of the crater they were looking for was being presented the same week, and would be largely missed by the scientific community.

In 1978, geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo were working for the Mexican state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán Peninsula. Penfield's job was to use geophysical data to scout possible locations for oil drilling. In the offshore magnetic data, Penfield noted anomalies whose depth he estimated and mapped. He then obtained onshore gravity data from the 1940s. When the gravity maps and magnetic anomalies were compared, Penfield described a shallow "bullseye", 180 km in diameter, appearing on the otherwise non-magnetic and uniform surroundings—clear evidence to him of an impact feature. A decade earlier, the same map had suggested a crater to contractor Robert Baltosser, but Pemex corporate policy prevented him from publicizing his conclusion.

Penfield presented his findings to Pemex, who rejected the crater theory, instead deferring to findings that ascribed the feature to volcanic activity. Pemex disallowed release of specific data, but let Penfield and Camargo present the results at the 1981 Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference. That year's conference was under-attended and their report attracted scant attention, with many experts on impact craters and the K–Pg boundary attending the Snowbird conference instead. Carlos Byars, a Houston Chronicle journalist who was familiar with Penfield and had seen the gravitational and magnetic data himself, wrote a story on Penfield and Camargo's claim, but the news did not disseminate widely.

Although Penfield had plenty of geophysical data sets, he had no rock cores or other physical evidence of an impact. He knew Pemex had drilled exploratory wells in the region. In 1951, one bored into what was described as a thick layer of andesite about 1.3 km down. This layer could have resulted from the intense heat and pressure of an Earth impact, but at the time of the borings it was dismissed as a lava dome—a feature uncharacteristic of the region's geology. Penfield was encouraged by William C. Phinney, curator of the lunar rocks at the Johnson Space Center, to find these samples to support his hypothesis. Penfield tried to secure site samples, but was told they had been lost or destroyed. When attempts to return to the drill sites to look for corroborating rocks proved fruitless, Penfield abandoned his search, published his findings and returned to his Pemex work. Seeing the 1980 Science paper, Penfield wrote to Walter Alvarez about the Yucatán structure, but received no response.

Alvarez and other scientists continued their search for the crater, although they were searching in oceans based on incorrect analysis of glassy spherules from the K–Pg boundary that suggested the impactor had landed in open water. Unaware of Penfield's discovery, University of Arizona graduate student Alan R. Hildebrand and faculty adviser William V. Boynton looked for a crater near the Brazos River in Texas. Their evidence included greenish-brown clay with surplus iridium, containing shocked quartz grains and small weathered glass beads that looked to be tektites. Thick, jumbled deposits of coarse rock fragments were also present, thought to have been scoured from one place and deposited elsewhere by an impact event. Such deposits occur in many locations but seemed concentrated in the Caribbean Basin at the K–Pg boundary. When Haitian professor Florentine Morás discovered what he thought to be evidence of an ancient volcano on Haiti, Hildebrand suggested it could be a telltale feature of a nearby impact. Tests on samples retrieved from the K–Pg boundary revealed more tektite glass, formed only in the heat of asteroid impacts and high-yield nuclear detonations.

In 1990, Carlos Byars told Hildebrand of Penfield's earlier discovery of a possible impact crater. Hildebrand contacted Penfield and the pair soon secured two drill samples from the Pemex wells, which had been stored in New Orleans for decades. Hildebrand's team tested the samples, which clearly showed shock-metamorphic materials. A team of California researchers surveying satellite images found a cenote (sinkhole) ring centered on the town of Chicxulub Pueblo that matched the one Penfield saw earlier; the cenotes were thought to be caused by subsidence of bolide-weakened lithostratigraphy around the impact crater wall. More recent evidence suggests the crater is 300 km wide, and the 180 km ring is an inner wall of it. Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. The crater was named for the nearby town of Chicxulub. Penfield also recalled that part of the motivation for the name was "to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it" after years of dismissing its existence.

In March 2010, forty-one experts from many countries reviewed the available evidence: twenty years' worth of data spanning a variety of fields. They concluded that the impact at Chicxulub triggered the mass extinctions at the K–Pg boundary. ; Dissenters, notably Gerta Keller of Princeton University, have proposed an alternate culprit: the eruption of the Deccan Traps in what is now the Indian subcontinent. This period of intense volcanism occurred before and after the Chicxulub impact; dissenting studies argue that the worst of the volcanic activity occurred before the impact, and the role of the Deccan Traps was instead shaping the evolution of surviving species post-impact. A 2013 study compared isotopes in impact glass from the Chicxulub impact with isotopes in ash from the K–Pg boundary, concluding that they were dated almost exactly the same within experimental error.

Impact specifics
A 2013 study published in Science estimated the age of the impact as 66,043,000 ± 11,000 years ago (± 43,000 years ago considering systematic error), based on multiple lines of evidence, including argon–argon dating of tektites from Haiti and bentonite horizons overlying the impact horizon in northeastern Montana, United States. This date was supported by a 2015 study based on argon–argon dating of tephra found in lignite beds in the Hell Creek and overlying Fort Union formations in northeastern Montana. A 2018 study based on argon–argon dating of spherules from Gorgonilla Island, Colombia, obtained a slightly different result of 66,051,000 ± 31,000 years ago. The impact has been interpreted to have occurred in Northern Hemisphere spring based on annual isotope curves in sturgeon and paddlefish bones found in an ejecta-bearing sedimentary unit at the Tanis site in southwestern North Dakota. This sedimentary unit is thought to have formed within hours of impact. A 2020 study concluded that the Chicxulub crater was formed by an inclined (45–60° to horizontal) impact from the northeast. The site of the crater at the time of impact was a marine carbonate platform. The water depth at the impact site varied from 100 m on the western edge of the crater to over 1200 m on the northeastern edge, with an estimated depth at the centre of the impact of approximately 650 m. The seafloor rocks consisted of a sequence of Jurassic–Cretaceous marine sediments, 3 km thick. They were predominantly carbonate rock, including dolomite (35–40% of total sequence) and limestone (25–30%), along with evaporites (anhydrite 25–30%), and minor amounts of shale and sandstone (3–4%) underlain by approximately 35 km of continental crust, composed of igneous crystalline basement including granite.

There is broad consensus that the Chicxulub impactor was a C-type asteroid with a carbonaceous chondrite-like composition, rather than a comet. In 1998, a meteorite, approximately 2.5 mm across, was described from a deep sea sediment core from the North Pacific, from a sediment sequence spanning the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (when the site was located in the central Pacific), with the meteorite being found at the base of the K-Pg boundary iridium anomaly within the sediment core. The meteorite was suggested to represent a fragment of the Chicxulub impactor. Analysis suggested that it best fitted the criteria of the CV, CO and CR groups of carbonaceous chondrites. A 2021 paper suggested, based on geochemical evidence including the excess of chromium isotope 54Cr and the ratios of platinum group metals found in marine impact layers, that the impactor matched the characteristics of CM or CR carbonaceous chondrites. The impactor was around 10 km in diameter —large enough that, if set at sea level, it would have reached taller than Mount Everest.

Effects
The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 km/s. The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 TtTNT. The impact generated winds in excess of 1000 km/h near the blast's center, and produced a transient cavity 100 km wide and 30 km deep that later collapsed. This formed a crater mainly under the sea and covered by 600 m of sediment by the 21st century. The impact, expansion of water after filling the crater, and related seismic activity spawned megatsunamis over 100 m tall, with one simulation suggesting the immediate waves from the impact may have reached up to 1.5 km high. The waves scoured the sea floor, leaving ripples underneath what is now Louisiana with average wavelengths of 600 m and average wave heights of 16 m, the largest ripples documented. Material shifted by subsequent earthquakes and the waves reached to what are now Texas and Florida, and may have disturbed sediments as far as 6000 km from the impact site. ,, The impact triggered a seismic event with an estimated moment magnitude of 9–11.

A cloud of hot dust, ash and steam would have spread from the crater, with as much as 25 trillion metric tons of excavated material being ejected into the atmosphere by the blast. Some of this material escaped orbit, dispersing throughout the Solar System, while some of it fell back to Earth, heated to incandescence upon re-entry. The rock heated Earth's surface and ignited wildfires, estimated to have enveloped nearly 70% of the planet's forests. The devastation to living creatures even hundreds of kilometers away was immense, and much of present-day Mexico and the United States would have been devastated. Fossil evidence for an instantaneous extinction of diverse animals was found in a soil layer only 10 cm thick in New Jersey, 2500 km away from the impact site, indicating that death and burial under debris occurred suddenly and quickly over wide distances on land. Field research from the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota published in 2019 shows the simultaneous mass extinction of myriad species combined with geological and atmospheric features consistent with the impact event.

Due to the relatively shallow water, the rock that was vaporized included sulfur-rich gypsum from the lower part of the Cretaceous sequence, and this was injected into the atmosphere. This global dispersal of dust and sulfates would have led to a sudden and catastrophic effect on the climate worldwide, instigating large temperature drops and devastating the food chain. The researchers stated that the impact generated an environmental calamity that extinguished life, but it also induced a vast subsurface hydrothermal system that became an oasis for the recovery of life. Researchers using seismic images of the crater in 2008 determined that the impactor landed in deeper water than previously assumed, which may have resulted in increased sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, due to more water vapor being available to react with the vaporized anhydrite. This could have made the impact even deadlier by cooling the climate and generating acid rain.

The emission of dust and particles could have covered the entire surface of Earth for several years, possibly up to a decade, creating a harsh environment for living things. Production of carbon dioxide caused by the destruction of carbonate rocks would have led to a sudden greenhouse effect. For over a decade or longer, sunlight would have been blocked from reaching the surface of Earth by the dust particles in the atmosphere, cooling the surface dramatically. Photosynthesis by plants would also have been interrupted, affecting the entire food chain. A model of the event developed by Lomax et al (2001) suggests that net primary productivity rates may have increased to higher than pre-impact levels over the long term because of the high carbon dioxide concentrations.

A long-term local effect of the impact was the creation of the Yucatán sedimentary basin which "ultimately produced favorable conditions for human settlement in a region where surface water is scarce".

Geophysical data
Two seismic reflection datasets have been acquired over the offshore parts of the crater since its discovery. Older 2D seismic datasets have also been used that were originally acquired for hydrocarbon exploration. A set of three long-record 2D lines was acquired in October 1996, with a total length of 650 km, by the BIRPS group. The longest of the lines, Chicx-A, was shot parallel to the coast, while Chicx-B and Chicx-C were shot NW–SE and SSW–NNE respectively. In addition to the conventional seismic reflection imaging, data was recorded onshore to allow wide-angle refraction imaging.

In 2005, another set of profiles was acquired, bringing the total length of 2D deep-penetration seismic data up to 2,470 km. This survey also used ocean bottom seismometers and land stations to allow 3D travel time inversion to improve the understanding of the velocity structure of the crater. The data was concentrated around the interpreted offshore peak ring to help identify possible drilling locations. At the same time, gravity data were acquired along 7638 km of profiles. The acquisition was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with logistical assistance from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (CICY – Yucatán Center for Scientific Investigation).

Borehole drilling
Intermittent core samples from hydrocarbon exploration boreholes drilled by Pemex on the Yucatán peninsula have provided some useful data. UNAM drilled a series of eight fully-cored boreholes in 1995, three of which penetrated deeply enough to reach the ejecta deposits outside the main crater rim, UNAM-5, 6 and 7. In 2001–2002, a scientific borehole was drilled near the Hacienda Yaxcopoil, known as Yaxcopoil-1 (or more commonly Yax-1), to a depth of 1511 m below the surface, as part of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. The borehole was cored continuously, passing through 100 m of impactites. Three fully-cored boreholes were also drilled by the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission) with UNAM. One of them, (BEV-4), was deep enough to reach the ejecta deposits.

In 2016, a joint United Kingdom–United States team obtained the first offshore core samples, from the peak ring in the central zone of the crater with the drilling of the borehole known as M0077A, part of Expedition 364 of the International Ocean Discovery Program. The borehole reached 1335 m below the seafloor.

Morphology
The form and structure (morphology) of the Chicxulub crater is known mainly from geophysical data. It has a well-defined concentric multi-ring structure. The outermost ring was identified using seismic reflection data. It is up to 130 km from the crater center, and is a ring of normal faults, throwing down towards the crater center, marking the outer limit of significant crustal deformation. This makes it one of the three largest impact structures on Earth. Moving into the center, the next ring is the main crater rim, also known as the "inner rim" which correlates with a ring of cenotes onshore and a major circular Bouguer gravity gradient anomaly. This has a radius that varies between 70 and 85 km. The next ring structure, moving inwards, is the peak ring. The area between the inner rim and peak ring is described as the "terrace zone", characterized by a series of fault blocks defined by normal faults dipping towards the crater center, sometimes referred to as "slump blocks". The peak ring is about 80 km in diameter and of variable height, from 400 to 600 m above the base of the crater in the west and northwest and 200 to 300 m in the north, northeast and east. The central part of the crater lies above a zone where the mantle was uplifted such that the Moho is shallower by about 1 – compared to regional values.

The ring structures are best developed to the south, west and northwest, becoming more indistinct towards the north and northeast of the structure. This is interpreted to be a result of variable water depth at the time of impact, with less well-defined rings resulting from the areas with water depths significantly deeper than 100 m.

Pre-impact geology
Before the impact, the geology of the Yucatán area, sometimes referred to as the "target rocks", consisted of a sequence of mainly Cretaceous limestones, overlying red beds of uncertain age above an unconformity with the dominantly granitic basement. The basement forms part of the Maya Block and information about its makeup and age in the Yucatán area has come only from drilling results around the Chicxulub crater and the analysis of basement material found as part of the ejecta at more distant K–Pg boundary sites. The Maya block is one of a group of crustal blocks found at the edge of the Gondwana continent. Zircon ages are consistent with the presence of an underlying Grenville age crust, with large amounts of late Ediacaran arc-related igneous rocks, interpreted to have formed in the Pan-African orogeny. Late Paleozoic granitoids (the distinctive "pink granite") were found in the peak ring borehole M0077A, with an estimated age of 326 ± 5 million years ago (Carboniferous). These have an adakitic composition and are interpreted to represent the effects of slab detachment during the Marathon-Ouachita orogeny, part of the collision between Laurentia and Gondwana that created the Pangaea supercontinent.

Red beds of variable thickness, up to 115 m, overlay the granitic basement, particularly in the southern part of the area. These continental clastic rocks are thought to be of Triassic-to-Jurassic age, although they may extend into the Lower Cretaceous. The lower part of the Lower Cretaceous sequence consists of dolomite with interbedded anhydrite and gypsum, with the upper part being limestone, with dolomite and anhydrite in part. The thickness of the Lower Cretaceous varies from 750 m up to 1675 m in the boreholes. The Upper Cretaceous sequence is mainly platform limestone, with marl and interbedded anhydrite. It varies in thickness from 600 m up to 1200 m. There is evidence for a Cretaceous basin within the Yucatán area that has been named the Yucatán Trough, running approximately south–north, widening northwards, explaining the observed thickness variations.

Impact rocks
The most common observed impact rocks are suevites, found in many of the boreholes drilled around the Chicxulub crater. Most of the suevites were resedimented soon after the impact by the resurgence of oceanic water into the crater. This gave rise to a layer of suevite extending from the inner part of the crater out as far as the outer rim.

Impact melt rocks are thought to fill the central part of the crater, with a maximum thickness of 3 km. The samples of melt rock that have been studied have overall compositions similar to that of the basement rocks, with some indications of mixing with carbonate source, presumed to be derived from the Cretaceous carbonates. An analysis of melt rocks sampled by the M0077A borehole indicates two types of melt rock, an upper impact melt (UIM), which has a clear carbonate component as shown by its overall chemistry and the presence of rare limestone clasts and a lower impact melt-bearing unit (LIMB) that lacks any carbonate component. The difference between the two impact melts is interpreted to be a result of the upper part of the initial impact melt, represented by the LIMB in the borehole, becoming mixed with materials from the shallow part of the crust either falling back into the crater or being brought back by the resurgence forming the UIM.

The "pink granite", a granitoid rich in alkali feldspar found in the peak ring borehole shows many deformation features that record the extreme strains associated with the formation of the crater and the subsequent development of the peak ring. The granitoid has an unusually low density and P-wave velocity compared to typical granitic basement rocks. Study of the core from M0077A shows the following deformation features in apparent order of development: pervasive fracturing along and through grain boundaries, a high density of shear faults, bands of cataclasite and ultra-cataclasite and some ductile shear structures. This deformation sequence is interpreted to result from initial crater formation involving acoustic fluidization followed by shear faulting with the development of cataclasites with fault zones containing impact melts.

The peak ring drilling below the sea floor also discovered evidence of a massive hydrothermal system, which modified approximately 1.4 × 105 km3 of Earth's crust and lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. These hydrothermal systems may provide support for the impact origin of life hypothesis for the Hadean eon, when the entire surface of Earth was affected by impactors much larger than the Chicxulub impactor.

Post-impact geology
After the immediate effects of the impact had stopped, sedimentation in the Chicxulub area returned to the shallow water platform carbonate depositional environment that characterised it before the impact. The sequence, which dates back as far as the Paleocene, consists of marl and limestone, reaching a thickness of about 1000 m. The K–Pg boundary inside the crater is significantly deeper than in the surrounding area.

On the Yucatán peninsula, the inner rim of the crater is marked by clusters of cenotes, which are the surface expression of a zone of preferential groundwater flow, moving water from a recharge zone in the south to the coast through a karstic aquifer system. From the cenote locations, the karstic aquifer is clearly related to the underlying crater rim, possibly through higher levels of fracturing, caused by differential compaction.

Astronomical origin and type of impactor
The original 1980 paper describing the crater suggested that it was created by an asteroid around 6.6 km in diameter. In 2021, four independent laboratories reported elevated concentrations of iridium in the crater's peak ring, further corroborating the asteroid impact hypothesis.

A 2007 Nature report proposed a specific astronomical origin for the Chicxulub asteroid. The authors, William F. Bottke, David Vokrouhlický, and David Nesvorný, argued that a collision in the asteroid belt 160 million years ago between a 170 km diameter parent body and another 60 km diameter body resulted in the Baptistina family of asteroids, the largest surviving member of which is 298 Baptistina. They proposed that the Chicxulub asteroid was also a member of this group. Subsequent evidence has cast doubt on this theory. A 2009 spectrographic analysis revealed that 298 Baptistina has a different composition more typical of an S-type asteroid than the presumed carbonaceous chondrite composition of the Chicxulub impactor. In 2011, data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer revised the date of the collision which created the Baptistina family to about 80 million years ago, allowing only 15 million years for the process of resonance and collision, which takes many tens of millions of years. In 2010, another hypothesis implicated the newly discovered asteroid 354P/LINEAR, a member of the Flora family, as a possible remnant cohort of the K–Pg impactor. In 2021, a numerical simulation study argued that the impactor likely originated in the outer main part of the asteroid belt.

Some scholars have argued that the impactor was a comet, not an asteroid. Two papers in 1984 proposed it to be a comet originating from the Oort cloud, and it was proposed in 1992 that tidal disruption of comets could potentially increase impact rates. In 2021, Avi Loeb and a colleague suggested in Scientific Reports that the impactor was a fragment from a disrupted comet. A rebuttal in Astronomy & Geophysics countered that Loeb et al. had ignored that the amount of iridium deposited around the globe, 2.0e8 - 2.8e8 kg, was too large for a comet of the size implied by the crater, and that they had overestimated likely comet impact rates. They concluded that all available evidence strongly favors an asteroid impactor, effectively ruling out a comet.

title: Chicxulub crater


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Unterwalden

Unterwalden, translated from the Latin inter silvas ("between the forests"), is the old name of a forest-canton of the Old Swiss Confederacy in central Switzerland, south of Lake Lucerne, consisting of two valleys or Talschaften, now two separate Swiss cantons (or two half-cantons), Obwalden and Nidwalden.

The name Unterwalden is first recorded in 1304, as the translation of Latin inter silvas, which together with in intramontanis was the name for monastery possessions in the area. In 1291, Rudolf I of Germany purchased the estates at Stans, Alpnach and Giswil. From 1304, the local bailiffs used their own seal. In 1309, Henry VII confirmed the imperial immediacy of the territory of Unterwalden as part of the imperial bailiwick of Waldstätte (but not as a political entity in its own right). The Federal Charter, internally dated 1291, is thought to originate at this time. In the text, Unterwalden figures as communitas hominum Intramontanorum Vallis Inferioris "community of the men between the mountains of the Lower Valley"; this is usually rendered as "the community of the Lower Valley of Unterwalden" in modern translations, and interpreted as Nidwalden or "Unterwalden proper". Unterwalden was one of the three participants in the foundation of the Old Swiss Confederacy, named in the Pact of Brunnen of 1315 with Uri and Schwyz.

The division of Unterwalden into two separate territories, Obwalden and Nidwalden, in the early period is less than clear. Their status as two independent Talschaften appears to develop over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, while they retain a single vote in the Confederacy.

The flag of Unterwalden in the 14th and 15th centuries was divided horizontally into equal parts red over white, identical with the flag of Solothurn. After the accession of Solothurn to the Confederacy in 1481, there were two cantons with identical flags, sometimes disambiguated by modifying the design of Solothurn's flag. By 1600, Nidwalden was known as Unterwalden proper or Subsylvania, while Obwalden was known as "Unterwalden ob dem Wald", strictly speaking an oxymoron, as it were Subsylvania super silva. From this time, there are also two separate coats of arms for the two half-cantons, the red-and-white flag for Unterwalden proper or Nidwalden, while Obwalden had a silver key in a red field.

By the 1640s, these two designs were re-combined in a white-and-red key on a red-and-white field (per fess gules and argent, a key paleways with double wards counterchanged) as the coat of arms of the united canton.

In Early Modern Switzerland, Unterwalden counted as a single state in "foreign relations" with the other member states of the Swiss Confederacy, but it consisted of two separate states internally, with separate governments, jurisdictions and separate flags.

Martin Zeiller in 1642 reports Unterwalden as divided in two separate Talschaften the inhabitants of which were derived from separate races, those of Obwalden from the "Romans", those in Nidwalden from the "Cimbri" (viz. Germans).

Unterwalden was restored in the Act of Mediation (1803) with a single constitution, but with two separate capitals, Sarnen and Stans, and two separate cantonal assemblies with equal sovereignty.

Unterwalden was a canton of the Restored Swiss Confederacy of 1815, and it was listed as a canton in the constitution of 1848, as Unterwalden (ob und nid dem Wald). The name of Unterwalden has been omitted in the 1999 constitution, with Obwalden und Nidwalden named as two separate cantons.

title: Unterwalden