Time for some intellectual garbage pickup, as Brad DeLong calls it.
Mark Thoma flags President Bush's latest claim that tax cuts increase revenue, which he made during an interview with Fox News:
I would also argue that cutting taxes made a significant difference, not only in dealing with a recession and an attack on our country, but it also made a significant difference in dealing with the deficit because the growing economy yielded more tax revenues, which allowed us to shrink the deficit.
Bush and other administration officials have made similar statements over and over since 2001 even though virtually no economists believe such a claim is plausible, including Bush's own economists. (But remember, Megan McArdle thinks supply-siders are "rather thin on the ground lately"!)
In a related Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dick Cheney credits President Bush's tax cuts for the fact that the US has "added more than eight million new jobs since August 2003 -- more than all other major industrialized nations combined." The problem, however, is that President Bush passed his first tax cut in 2001. Cheney, like the Bush Treasury Department, is skipping over the decline in jobs from 2001 to 2003.
Finally, TNR's Jon Chait eviscerates the latest batch of dishonest arguments from tax cut advocates:
[T]he conservative argument fundamentally depends upon denying the 1990s. There is a two-step process here. The first step is deviously brilliant: Insist that undoing the Bush tax cuts would be some radical new left-wing experiment that's never been tried before in this country. When Hillary Clinton proposed to restore the top tax rate to where it stood before 2001, Lawrence Kudlow fulminated, "This is France before Sarzoky stuff." Mitt Romney said, "I don't think that her platform would get her elected president of France, let alone president of this country." (This was in keeping with the line of attack a Romney strategy document neatly summarized as "Hillary=France.") Now, you might think that, if any comparison could be drawn from a plan to bring tax rates in the United States back to where they were in the '90s, it would be to ... the United States in the '90s. But conservatives understand that this would not be sufficiently frightening, so they've decided that France is the more apt parallel.
Having successfully severed the '90s from the administration that presided over them, the second step is to suture those years onto the Republican record. Numerous conservatives, most prominently Kudlow, have begun speaking of the "twenty-five-year Reagan boom." (Note that conservatives like Kudlow are able to assert this while simultaneously asserting that, if we reinstated the policies that held sway during the most prosperous stretch of that 25-year boom, we would be just like France.)
A related trick is to find ever more statistically creative ways of giving George W. Bush credit for the '90s. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Judd Gregg asked the Congressional Budget Office to calculate how low-income families with children fared since 1991. Why since 1991? That way it would lump together eight years of low-wage growth with the four years of low-wage decline that followed. Sure enough, the study found those families enjoyed sharply higher income through the '90s and then have seen their income drop ever since. The Wall Street Journal editorial page seized upon this finding to declare that "the poor have been getting less poor."
Earlier this summer, visiting American Enterprise Institute scholar Arthur C. Brooks pulled the same trick. He triumphantly noted that poor- and middle-income workers have seen their incomes rise "between 1993 and 2003"--yes, eight of those ten years took place on Clinton's watch, before incomes for the poor started to drop--then proceeded to flay liberals for being obsessed with inequality. This elementary-level statistical legerdemain was considered so insightful that both City Journal and the Journal editorial page decided to print it. Perhaps those esteemed right-wing publications will also be interested to learn that Barry Bonds and I have combined to hit 762 home runs, which surely qualifies me as the greatest baseball player of all time.
See also my post on a David Brooks column based on the CBO report mentioned above.
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