Mineral tax will live shorter. On top of that tax revenues for the government would be low, too. That leads to a Laffer curve-shaped function of tax revenue for the government, in which the “optimal level of taxation” is somewhere in the middle. Any mineral tax must be neutral. Neutral is defined as maintaining incentives for investors to exploit minerals. Therefore, the revenues must exceed the costs. Furthermore, the government must be able to rely on the amount of tax money it receives, therefore, the tax imposed must be as certain and as steady as possible. Often, governments decide to use a
Laffer curve Jude Wanniski, who was also present at the meeting. The basic concept was not new; Laffer himself notes antecedents in the writings of the 14th-century social philosopher Ibn Khaldun and others. Laffer does not claim to have invented the concept; he notes that there are antecedents, including in the "Muqaddimah" by 14th-century Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun, and in the writings of John Maynard Keynes. It was not until the 1970s that Laffer's name began to be associated with the idea. The term "Laffer curve" was reportedly coined by Jude Wanniski (a writer for "The Wall Street Journal") after a 1974