Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"There has been a long history of research on this very important topic. And we have a new study, just came out from the very prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research. How they measure taxes was taxes paid by households and businesses as a percent of total income. So for example, do you pay 20 percent of your income in taxes, 30 percent of your income in taxes, and then they looked at that for the entire economy. And what they did find in their analysis was that if that percentage increased - that is, if you went from paying 20 percent of you income in taxes to 30 percent of your income in taxes - there was a correlation of that increase with slower economic growth. So higher relative tax payments - and this is all done at the national level - does seem to be related to slower economic growth. However, they also found that the adverse effects of those higher relative tax payments on growth are reduced if the increase in taxes was used to reduce the budget deficit and to reduce the national debt. And I think these findings are sort of in line at least with what I perceive people think about. They understand that they don't like to pay higher taxes and, indeed, if there are higher taxes, they may work less, and that may slow the economy down. On the other hand, they know we have a national debt and they think, well, if those higher taxes are going to go for reducing that debt, I'm willing to do that. I won't change my behavior. And it's kind of nice to have a piece of research that dovetails quite nicely with what people in general think."