There They Go Again: Tax Cutting as Religion

JoeCarl

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday November 10, 2015 · 10:08 PM PST

2015/11/10 · 22:08

TAGS

Edit Tags

Tag History

Done Editing Tags

In tonight’s Republican debate, there was a prayer service featuring a liturgical petition and response. The petition was given by the Fox Business, fair-and-balanced moderators: “Oh Reagan, thou gave us tax cuts.” The response was from each and every candidate: “And we shall double down on them.” This always was thoughtless policy, but Kansas makes the stupid in it obvious.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has said, “On taxes, you need to get your overall rates down … to create growth.”[i] There is nothing new in that. It is what every Republican says (one suspects, five times a day while bowing toward the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara). It also is wrong, as Brownback is proving.

Brownback called his massive 2012 tax cut “a real live experiment.”[ii] Three years later, the Kansas economy is a train wreck.[iii][iv][v][vi] Brownback is both backtracking and cheating: “Now, Kansas's red ink has left the governor red- faced. Brownback is asking Republican state lawmakers to slow the income tax cuts over the next few years, raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, overhaul school funding, and divert money from the state's highway fund in order to balance the budget.”[vii]

There is nothing new in that, either. Reagan had to do a similar dance to avoid making the deficit any worse than his tax cuts already had made it.[viii] His own people have said as much,[ix] as Brownback must have known. Brownback also must have been aware of an analysis by the Congressional Research Service[x] that I have reviewed in a previous diary. The analysis used data, not theories or curves drawn on napkins but data, and found no correlation between taxes and economic growth or any of the mechanisms that Republicans site as causing growth. (More below the break.)

None of that fazed Brownback. Neither did the unambiguous failure of his own policies. None of that fazed the Republican presidential candidates, and neither has the Kansas economic implosion. They pretend that the historical examples don’t exist, they pretend that the data do not say what they say, and they pretend that Brownback’s “experiment” did not bite him – and Kansas – in the ass. They have managed entirely to evade reality on tax cuts, and they are equally impervious to evidence on austerity, as Paul Krugman has documented.[xi]

In short, Republican economic theory has morphed into religious dogma and every Republican into an Imam. Republicans never will concede reality regardless of how many data we throw at them. The public, though, might.

That brings up a different problem. One of the more common themes in my diaries is that Democrats desperately need to stop hiding and start fighting. It’s not happening. In The Atlantic, Russell Berman noted that “given how neatly Brownback's tax experiment fits into the Democratic argument against conservative budgeting, it's surprising that it hasn't drawn more coverage. That's particularly unusual because … Koch Industries is based in Wichita, and the family was a big supporter of Brownback's original tax plan.”[xii]

If Democrats do not hammer on Republican tax and austerity policies using Kansas, Brownback, and the Koch brothers, loudly and repeated, they need to disband and let a credible opposition form.