Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between taxes and economic growth. Since the rise of supply side economics in the 1980’s as a doctrine for understanding macroeconomics, many claims have been made regarding a connection between the rates and amount of taxes collected and subsequent economic growth or decline. This thesis analyzes those claims through a regression analysis of tax, economic, and social factors that are widely believed to be associated with changes in economic growth, using statistics gathered from publicly available sources, such as the U.S. Census Bureau. The regression analysis includes economic data from all 50 U.S states from 10 years of a 12 year period. The resulting findings indicate that a tenuous connection does exist between taxes and economic growth, but that the relationship is not consistent or consistently significant across many different possible kinds of economic growth. Thus eschewing any notions of a one size fits all tax policy. Furthermore, a determination is made that other, non-tax, economic and social factors are actually more important to our understanding of economic growth and of what constitutes good policy in this field of economic data.