Bruce Bartlett, formerly of the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, restates reality in the face of Tim Pawlenty's fantasty-driven economic plan:
Pawlenty would cut the top individual income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, cut the corporate rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, and eliminate completely all taxation of capital gains, interest and dividends.... Implausibly, Pawlenty asserted that despite reducing revenues by some $8 trillion over the next 10 years ... his plan would balance the budget. I could find no data or analysis of how Pawlenty’s plan would actually achieve this goal....
What is holding back business investment is not taxes, but poor economic prospects. For some time, members of the National Federation of Independent Business have listed "poor sales" as their number one problem. Businesses are not going to invest, no matter how low the tax rate is, if there is no demand for their output.
Now if only there were a GOP demand for reason and empirical evidence.
I divulge this yearning notwithstanding the fascinating NY Times article yesterday, "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth," in which it is noted that
some [cognitive science] researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose [than 'the search for truth']: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick ... is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.
Hence the modern GOP's key political insight: Never let them see you sweat; which is another way of saying, just blather with towering confidence about whatever is easier for the gaping masses to comprehend. While Democrats convulse over yet another Keynesian analysis of federal spending's multiplier effect, Republicans scream "Cut the budget!" and from this will come "jobs!"
A simple thought experiment. Imagine yourself at a diner, in which you overhear three seated people. One asks the other two, "I wonder how we can reduce unemployment in this country?" The second begins to mumble about some guy "by the name of J.M. Keynes who confronted this very issue back in the early 20th century and what he econometrically determined through keen ..."; while the third person blurts with stentorian certainty, "The goddamn government needs to stop spending so goddamn much money so we can all get back to goddamn work!"
Whom do you think the innocent inquirer is more likely to believe?
"Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth."