One of the two highly touted editors of the Bloomberg View opinion/editorial operation is already gone, so at least we know that Jamie Rubin is not to blame for this Bloomberg editorial:
If anything, the statistics point in the other direction: When taxes have risen, so have the number of jobs....the data don't back up assertions that tax increases on the affluent thwart growth and jobs.
Look what happened under President Bill Clinton, when the top marginal tax rate was raised to 39.6 percent from 31 percent. Almost 23 million jobs were created, versus the 1.1 million new jobs under George W. Bush's lower-tax years. Even more compelling: During the golden age of growth in the 1950s, the top tax rate was as high as 91 percent.
There are two strong counterarguments to the Clinton and 1950s examples that the editorial does not take into account.
In respect of Clinton, the argument is that he was a tax-cutter, not a tax-increaser. The growth really got going after Clinton signed NAFTA and got tariff reductions though GATT/WTO that Lawrence Summers has called "the largest tax cut in the history of the world." And after 1997, when Clinton signed a bill cutting the top long-term capital gains rate to 20% from 28%.
In respect of 1950s, it wasn't actually a golden age of growth. The golden age of growth was the 1960s, after the Kennedy tax cut was passed. Much of Kennedy's 1960 campaign was about how to raise growth from the low levels of the Eisenhower-Nixon 1950s stagnation. In 1954 "real" GDP growth was negative 0.6%, in 1956 and 1957 it was positive 2% both years, and 1958 it was negative 0.9%, according to the tables at BEA.gov. What growth there was was owing to loopholes and shelters that made it possible to avoid the full 91% tax. And anyway, if Michael Bloomberg thinks a 91% top marginal tax rate is so job-producing, nothing is stopping him from instituting one in New York City, where the unemployment rate is 8.7%, well above the 8% rate of New York State as a whole.
The Bloomberg people already have within their opinion operation one of the brightest writers about tax in the entire country, Amity Shlaes. Their best move by far would be to just let her write the tax editorials. That would make it possible for Bloomberg View to stop churning out this sort of nonsense, which I can only imagine the mayor must find embarrassing if he reads it.