“Reality,” Stephen Colbert famously explained to President George W. Bush, “has a well-known liberal bias.” And for Republicans, reality bites most when it comes to tax cuts. After all, for over 30 years, tax cuts have been the GOP’s one and only prescription for both economic booms and busts, recessionary slowdowns and budget surpluses, and probably even male pattern baldness and erectile dysfunction. Ever since Arthur Laffer first bottled his supply-side snake oil, the GOP’s best and brightest have promised that the explosion of economic activity unleashed by lower tax rates would more than offset the tax revenue lost. That’s why, as President Bush boasted, “tax cuts pay for themselves” and why, as former Arizona Sen. John Kyl lectured, “You should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.”
Of course, things didn’t work out that way. In eight short years, President Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt. George W. Bush nearly doubled it again. (The Bush tax cuts made permanent in 2013 still continue to produce red ink into the indefinite future.) But Laffer’s supposed supply-side miracle failed because it had to. No other outcome was possible. As Austan Goolsbee summed it up two years ago:
Moon landing was real. Evolution exists. Tax cuts lose revenue. The research has shown this a thousand times. Enough already.
To put it another way, the budgetary math simply cannot work. Which is why Paul Ryan and his Republican allies instead want to change the way math itself works as soon as they control both chambers of Congress. And if they succeed, voodoo economics will become a feature, not a bug.
That’s the word from Paul Ryan (R-WI), the current House Budget Committee Chairman almost certain to take over the gavel of the Ways and Means Committee in January.
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Continue reading about Ryan’s scam below.
