Bruce Bartlett, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explains how the shift to an anti-tax philosophy caused the Republican Party to become the party of big government:
The supply-siders are to a large extent responsible for this mess, myself included. We opened Pandora’s Box when we got the Republican Party to abandon the balanced budget as its signature economic policy and adopt tax cuts as its raison d’être. In particular, the idea that tax cuts will “starve the beast” and automatically shrink the size of government is extremely pernicious.
Indeed, by destroying the balanced budget constraint, starve-the-beast theory actually opened the flood gates of spending. As I explained in a recent column, a key reason why deficits restrained spending in the past is because they led to politically unpopular tax increases. But if, as Republicans now maintain, taxes must never be increased at any time for any reason then there is never any political cost to raising spending and cutting taxes at the same time, as the Bush 43 administration and a Republican Congress did year after year.
(Via: Balkinization)
October 16th, 2009 | 2:37 pm
Contrary to Mr. Bartlett’s assertions, the GOP did not become the party of “big government” as a result of SSE or tax cuts, but as a result of not living within the constraints of the Constitution…which last time I checked, is a malady that equally afflicts politicians all stripes regardless of party affiliation.
Indeed, Reagan advocated tax cuts not only to stimulate economic growth, but because he considered it immoral for government to stake a 70% or greater claim to a man’s income and because such confiscatory policies inhibited work and investment. Bartlett leaves out the fact that Reagan not only advocated tax cuts, but a balanced budget admendment and a line item veto to combat deficits…two things denied to him by a Democratically controled Congress aided and abetted by a handful of gutless Republicans. While Mr. Bartlett may be correct that the notion that tax cuts “will autmotically shrink the size of government” may be pernicious, his claim that “defecits restrain spending” is at least as equally pernicious if not just outright incoherent, particularly in light of the current state of affairs in DC, where unprecedented trillion dollar deficits are most certainly not putting the brakes on unprecedented levels of spending.