This scheme has been apparent since 1981, when Reagan's OMB Director, David Stockman, famously admitted that supply-side economics was merely a "Trojan horse" to bring down the tax rates for the upper income brackets. If nothing else, it's refreshing that right-wingers don't even bother anymore devising rationales for this redistributionist graft. "Party of ideas" indeed.

"tend to defer to the tiny circle of supply-siders who their side has anointed as the 'experts' but are in fact charlatans." I agree. But go deeper. Why does their charlantanery go unnoticed? Well, because insofar as you don't happen to have a burning interest in tax policy it serves your career not to develop one.

Compare this post to your previous one wondering why the US does not develop a greater expertise in languages and area-knowledge in the Middle East. The answer is just as you write here: the Middle East 'experts' favoured by the administration are in fact charlatans, and their charlatanry goes unrepudiated because it serves ones career not to develop an knowledge about the Middle East which might run against the interests of the best organised lobby groups on Middle East politics.

Seems fair enough, since a lot of liberals' arguments about taxes are predicated on the notion that heavily taxing wealthy people is a positive good. Basicly, envy and spite rationalized as being virtuous.

No liberals arguments are based on the premises that:

1) you need to pay for the government, if spending is 23% of GDP then taxes at 18% is unsustainable, no supply side magic is going to wish this problem away. 

2) there are many things that are better done by the government than the private sector; I know you disagree and that is fine, but lets debate the real issue, first have a serious discussion to establish what the correct role of government is and the spending necessary for it then we can set the tax policy to achieve it, Conservatives do this backward, they just cut the taxes and never address the spending question.  Kind of leads credence to the argument that they really don't care about size of government or spending at all, they just want to cut taxes.

3) Progressive taxes are the correct way to pay for the government we all need but again this is a seperate debate.  You probably disagree and that is fine, again lets establish the level of government spending we want and then figure out the tax policy to raise the revenue necessary to support it.

The common theme I'm getting at here is that taxes are the "tail", Conservatives are afraid to talk about the "Dog" I think for two reasons, 1) they really can't come up with a legitimate plan that gets gov spending down to the 16-17% of GDP they claim to want becasue there simply isn't any low hanging fruit to cut;  It is easier to talk about silly slogans like "waste, fraud and abuse" and "pork barallel spending" than mention the cold hard facts that in reality they add up to rounding errors on rounding errors and real cuts will entail cutting real programs that people like.  2) they know if they seriously did propose what it would take to get spending that low they'd be voted out of office so fast their heads would spin.

EWK, don't be coy. There is a significant body of liberals who actively despise successful people, and want to punish them for making the hard choices that they were unable to make.

Having said that, I'll tacitly agree with your points #1, #2 and #3 as worded - I may disagree about the specifics, but the real problem is #1, and until #1 is addressed, the others don't really matter.

And as for your "dog and tail" comment - this is a two way street - Liberals are afraid to talk about the general manginess of the Dog - they can't seem to raise the will to get rid of programs that aren't working, or put things back into the private sector. Put another way - liberals never find a government program that couldn't succeed if it just had more money. and 2) They know that if they did take a serious look at and cut the size of governemnt, they also would be voted out of office.

Bottom line - if either side makes hard choices, they lose. If neither side makes hard choices, we lose. And thus, our current situation.

There is a significant body of liberals who actively despise successful people, and want to punish them for making the hard choices that they were unable to make.

I guess that depends on your definition of success.

Favoring a progressive tax system is not the same as despising people who are wealthy. It's more about a shared responsibility.

There is a significant body of liberals who actively despise successful people, and want to punish them for making the hard choices that they were unable to make

Silly.

Is it just your gut that tells you it's true, or do you have some kind of evidence you could reveal to us? 

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

While I agree that there is a substantive group of liberals who are anti-rich, I think you're misstating the rationale. That group combines anti-materialism with some notions of class warfare to arrive at the idea that being rich is bad. The line:
Punishing them for the hard choices they were unable to make
is insane - class mobility in this country is a hell of a lot less than 100%, so to suggest that everyone who's wealthy or rich now got there by sweat is patently absurd. Some people work very hard and make a lot money, some people work very hard and make little money, and plenty of people don't work that hard. The underlying suggestion that people get rich by virtue weakens your point.

While there are programs that liberals are probably too loath to get rid of, the reality is that the most government spending is not related to the social justice issues. If you're really ready to junk the entire misbegotten Star Wars program (ask the physicists who still can't produce evidence of its feasibility, or hit a missile with a homing beacon on it), plus subsidies to oil, monopoly status for telcos, and any other number of "free market" or conservative entities sucking at the teat of government, eventually we can work our way down in budget size to cuts in social welfare and justice programs.

But I submit the following in response to your "mangy dog" argument: Liberals believe in government, and as such, we want good government, and the less strident crowd that inhabits this Cafe will openly consider jettisoning programs we don't think work. Conservatives and libertarians (I take you to be the latter) by and large don't believe government can be good - making government better means making less of it, whether or not the government is achieving its stated goals. So it's a little hard to trust rhetoric from those groups about improving government, and we've made fools of ourselves for decades believing it. To the point of the other response to your post, only progressives like Clinton and Gore even bothered to try to reduce the deficit and shrink government - and that during a boom! By contrast, Reagan and Bush talked a lot about small government and fiscal responsibility but instead ran deficits.

Yes, government can often use improvement. But I find it hard to believe that the only thing that can improve it are cuts.

I just can't stand the unserious type of argument McIntyre makes. I mean, you don't even need to know anything about economics to show how overly simplistic this line of reasoning is. You just need to understand basic math.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that yes - by cutting tax rates, you can stimulate economic growth. And then let's also assume that the economic growth is so big, that even though you're collecting less of a percentage, you're actually getting more revenue overall. Great. Wonderful. But now follow through to the obvious conclusion: if you cut the rates to zero, the economy must grow infinitely large! No taxes - but tons of money! Treasure bath!

Obviously, this doesn't work. When you cut the tax rate down to zero, you get ZERO revenue. Thus, in the process of lowering tax rates, there absolutely must come a point at which the lower rate causes less revenue to come in, since the economy just can't grow any faster.

To use McIntyre's analogy, the pie can only grow so fast, even if you take no slice. So you have to reach a point at which a smaller slice yields less pie. There is no way around that.

I'm sure people have mentioned this many times before, so I'm sorry for the repetition. But the all too common habit of using such crude arguments to confidently explain the functioning of a ridiculously complex economic system just really angers me.

I have a choice about whether to join a country club, or enroll my kids in little league. Ergo, fees for those memberships are not evil, because the evil derives from the fact that taxes are coerced.

You think Gates is under-taxed because he isn't worth 25,000 times as much as you. We think Gates is over-taxed because the government services he gets aren't worth 25,000 times as much as what you get.

In short, we reject, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." in favor of, "Getting what you paid for, and paying for what you get." A fair tax system would consist entirely of user fees aimed at extracting from each tax-payer the costs they personaly incured.

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particularly evidence from economic theory

There's no evidence from economic theory to support this nonsense. All there is Laffer's drawing on a napkin, and his observation that at some level of taxation, people will stop working.

In point of fact, Reagan's lowering of marginal rates did have some positive revenue influence, enhanced by Bradley Gephardt in 1986, which broadened the tax base by eliminating loopholes. But that wasn't because people worked any harder. The rich people just spend less effort on tax avoidance because marginal rates were lower.

But that's not theory. That's empiricism. And this president is worse, because he is introducing distortions and lowering the growth rate by introducing loopholes and subsidies. The best tax for efficiency purposes is a lump sum tax. The best welfare program, for efficiency purposes is a lump sum transfer. Neither affect anyone's decision at the margin. The level doesn't matter, for efficiency purposes.

For equity purposes, policy makers have to decide whether and whom to subsidize. But it's never the case that you can indefinitely cut taxes overall, raise spending and decrease the deficit.

You won't find any economic theory that suggests you can increase tax revenues by cutting taxes. And certainly not by cutting taxes on capital. That will induce a shift of the terms of trade away from labor and to capital, which will increase capital holders income at the expense of the taxpaying wage earners.

And if 10 or 20 years down the road, social programs do get cut, like Social Security and Medicare, do you think there's even one conservative or Republican who will care?

It's win-win for the Republicans, they get their tax cuts now, and if everything falls apart later - even better. The average American needs to be told what they aren't getting. They need to be reminded that it's unacceptable that 45 million Americans have no health insurace. They need to see hear about the millions of American children growing up with a second-rate education.

If they can see it, it could usher in ten, maybe 20 years of progressive government. Probably, just enough time to clean up the right's mess before everyone gets greedy again.

It's hard to sell, "Let's all get along and treat each other with respect."

With the slogan, "Tax cuts! Tax cuts! Tax cuts!"

No one likes paying taxes. But like death, taxes are unavoidable.

Rather than discussing how lowering taxes may or may not impact the economy, let's discuss our priorities when it comes to spending tax revenue.

I think innovation is a great driving factor in the economy. Suppose, the government spends a few billion dollars a year developing something cool like non-carbon based energy sources? Wouldn't that be something positive for the economy and the country?

Sure, the oil companies may not benefit too much, but it would create a whole new industry and entirely new ways of powering America.

We need energy, but do we need carbon based energy? Should we be spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year attempting to protect our oil interests, or should we start seriously thinking about a commitment to renewable-non-carbon-based energy? I wouldn't mind paying taxes for some of that.

Brett Belmore writes, "Getting what you paid for, and paying for what you get." A fair tax system would consist entirely of user fees aimed at extracting from each tax-payer the costs they personaly incured."

Brett: Am I to understand that under your proposed system, if my house catches fire, I should be personally liable for the "user fees"--the cost of hiring firemen to put the fire out? Of course, if I don't want to pay for putting the fire out, I have the option to let it burn, possibly igniting nearby houses. So under this system, my neighbors also need to take "personal responsibility" for the cost of living in non-flammable dwellings.

I want to see you propose *one* non-laughable method of using a "user fee" system to fund *any* currently existing public service (police, fire, roads, libraries, etc.)

Well, if "non-laughable" means that *you* wouldn't laugh at it, I suspect the challenge is by defintion impossible. But you sure threw me a softball by mentioning libraries, didn't you? What the heck would stop a library from renting out books, the way a video rental store rents out tapes and disks?

As for firemen and police, I have invented this novel concept known as "insurance", which I suspect would solve the problems.

For roads, wear and tear on pavement roughly tracks the usage of tires and gasoline, therefore a properly sized tax on both would function as a good approximation to a user fee for road usage. We might even try toll roads. (Advances in RFID technology allow a great deal of transparency in this, while still allowing privacy.) Oh, wait, the concept is laughable, nobody could ever build a toll road and make money.

Are you even vaguely aware that every single existing public service you mentioned used to be privately supplied, paid for without taxation? I swear, if the government took over the grocery stores, twenty years from now the left would take it as a given that private provision of foodstuffs was a laughable concept...

You didn't answer my question: I didn't ask how much Gates should be taxed. I asked how much value he gains and how much government support of Microsoft costs everyone else.

Pick a number. If it is $1, then by your earlier argument, he should pay a tax of $1 and the rest of his billions should be untaxable.

So, what is the number?

1. Yes, I see no reason to suppose that for profit libraries would carry more titles than, say, Netflix carries for DVDs, or maybe Blockbusters. Four or five, tops, right?

Hell, a few miles from here there IS a for profit library, a paperback book trading center, where you bring in paperbacks you've read, and for a truely nominal sum, walk away with an equal number of new titles. I doubt that they have more than 20,000 different books in stock, though... You'll find similar institutions in just about any college town for more substantial reading.

2. But would your premiums be higher by more than the amount you currently pay in taxes to support the fire department? THAT is the question, of course.

3. Yeah, it would have to be so high, that current gas taxes pay for the roads, and then some.

4. You know wrong.

It's the usual; Liberals have no end of imagination for how the government can work miracles, but as soon as it's suggested something could be done without the government, you're about as imaginative as a brick, only with less appreciation for history.

Coerced only in the sense that if you want to participate in our society you need to pay taxes. You are free to rid yourself of the shackles of taxation and go live in the woods or find yourself an island, just as it is your right to start your own little league. But I think it is our right to say that you can't participate in our tax funded capitalist barter system. This great system was democratically developed over a few hundred years with a historical influence that goes back centuries. To call this development evil is nonsense and frankly seems unamerican.

And you didn't address my point at all. Gates takes part in our society, gets all the benefits thereof, and at the end of his life takes home 50-100 billion dollars. The percentage of that that goes back to the government that made it all possible is irrelevant. And make no mistake that it was the govenment that made it all possible. Without the U.S. government he'd be nothing. There is no nation on the planet that would have provided him with such compensation. So the question is whether or not he is fairly conpensated? The answer is a big No, he is outrageously compensated well beyond his contribution to society. To a conservative (and libertarians are a type of conservative), this variable never enters the equation. But ignoring this variable is ignoring the forest for the trees. We can organize our society however we want, capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, fascism, and whatever combination thereof. And you can jettison fairness for the simplicity of proportional service and caveman morality, but it is inferior and not worth the potential of humanity. So press your advantage on everyone you can while you can, but let the rest of us move human consciousness forward.

Aren't the real tax cuts on unearned income? That is, our income tax may be adjusted a little (but the AMT tends to wipe out those adjustments), but the taxes on unearned income were more than halved!

To me, this is the best proof possible that the tax cuts are designed to benefit wealthy people.