Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The Reagan Era of Smaller Government?

Duncan Black’s post entitled Sully is a reaction to an article by Dana Milbank on a conference where Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan were doing some Bush bushing (also see Kash’s post). Sully and Bruce long for the days when President Reagan allegedly brought us a smaller government. Duncan writes: I know the myth of […]

Do Americans Want a Free Lunch (National Review’s Continuing Nonsense Regarding Taxes)

Mallory Factor condones political pandering over leadership: Americans do not want higher taxes … Most Democrats in Congress are ignoring the two-thirds of their constituents who want tax rates to stay where they are, voting consistently to raise taxes and using the procedural mechanism of the filibuster to keep automatic rate hikes looming over American […]

J. C. Watts Explaining the 2001 Tax Cut – While Robert Rubin Trumps Dick Cheney

I wanted to follow-up on a couple of aspects as to my post noting Dick Cheney hoping people would save more. First of all – one of our readers is now saying Bush and his allies never said that the Administration wanted to give people their money back so they could consume more. Yes – […]

Dead-Eye Dick Does Dynamic Scoring

Expert marksman and Nobel laureate Dick Cheney delighted the Conservative Political Action Conference with the suggestion that free lunch supply-side spin is solid economics: Cheney touted President Bush’s recently announced proposal to create a tax analysis division as a move toward providing more evidence for the administration’s side of the argument. “The president’s tax policies […]

What Tax Cut?

Tyler Cowen cuts through a quarter of a century of free lunch Republican spin in just two sentences: Taxes already were raised when the government spending occurred. In that sense the “tax cuts” never were permanent. This is what I love about conservative economists – they get right to the point. Twenty-five years ago, I’m […]