The official Republican Party line on taxes remains more or less what Grover Norquist wants it to be. Taxes must not go up, in any way or for any reason. And that's a big problem, because without higher taxes future generations will be left with a miserable choice: Cope with much higher deficits or enact massive cuts to essential government programs, starting with Medicare and Social Security.

The classic Republican (and conservative) response is that higher taxes would extract a different, even more onerous cost: They would stifle the economy. The argument has intuitive appeal: Don't taxes on income discourage people from working? Don't taxes on goods would discourage people from buying things? But, as a number of scholars and policy analysts (myself included) have said before, the data from abroad seems to confound this thesis. The Scandinavian countries, in particular, raise proportionally more in taxes than we do, without obvious ill effects on their economies.

Is that data misleading? A new blog post from Lane Kenworthy suggests that it is not.

Kenworthy, a political scientist and sociologist with a blog (appropriately) called "Consider the Evidence," notes that taxation levels in the U.S., Denmark, and Sweden were actually very similar as late as the 1960s, when tax collections amounted to about a quarter of GDP in all of the countries. Afterwards, they diverged, with U.S. levels staying roughly level and the Scandinavian levels peaking at around 50 percent of GDP in the 1980s: