"Economists tend to roll their eyes when the Laffer curve is mentioned. A panel of elite academic economists across the political spectrum found in 2012 that none of its respondents agreed that the United States was on the wrong side of the curve. Even George Stigler, a leader of the Chicago School of Economics who disliked taxes at least as much as Laffer, described the Laffer curve as “more or less a tautology.”"
It is a tautology, so I'm not sure why people get annoyed about it. If you look at the curve, it just says the government will get 0 revenue at either 0% or 100% taxes, and the maximum is somewhere in the middle. It doesn't say where, or make any judgments about current tax rates.
Obviously it shouldn't be used for any kind of serious discussion about tax rates, other than pointing out the baseline obviousness that taxing too high is counterproductive.
It's not obvious to quite a lot of people. The fact that government revenues can go down when taxes go up, or go up when taxes go down, is regularly treated as a shocking revelation in forums like the Guardian. As the article states, macroeconomic modelling has for a long time basically assumed that people won't react rationally in the face of government policy changes, sometimes because they implicitly assume global government (i.e. the models don't handle the possibility of people leaving).
That seems wrong, as most high tax countries (Denmark, Norway, ...) have full employment and very high standards of living for decades now. Do you have a source for that? Eastern European countries catching up with development don't count, see Piketty.
This is often a problem of metrics. US-centric economic views tend to favor metrics we're really good at, but that don't matter to the average person, like GDP.
The US has an absurd GDP. But if you could compare the average American and, say, the average Norwegian, I don't think it would even be close in terms of quality of life. Particularly if we include things such as food, exercise, and education.
That’s the problem. You should comparing it only with states like Massachusetts, Connecticut etc. (and even then.. Norway is inflated by oil revenue, IMHO Denmark is a lot more impressive).