Strategy vs tactics in the economy. 

This gets played out over and over, and gets ingrained as dogma within the media, and therefore is spit back out as supposed fact. 

Here is the thing, the economy is supposed to grow at a regular steady pace from year to year, accounting for increased population and thus new consumers as a measure of GDP.  When the gdp spikes, there should be an expected slowdown or even recession as the system balances itself, however this is politically unpalatable, so many measures are taken to avoid any slowdown, and tend to mess things up more than a normal recession would.

The republicans specifically, and the populace in general has a tough time separating short term bumps from long term growth.  When you look at something like a tax cut, this is a mechanism for a short term bump in the economy, it will allow for more disposable income for investment or spending, but will soon be acclimated into the national budget  and lose it's effect.  The same goes for fed rate cuts, these are very short term, sometimes less than a day long bumps that help for a short period but have no sustainability.

Long term growth entails big ideas that government may have little to do with.  Take for example the space race in the 60s, this was a large government expenditure for what seemed to be a narrow goal, and yet lay the foundation for new developments in electronics, computers, composite materials and plastics.  The amount of long term growth from this investment is hard to calculate, because inventions, like computers would likely have occured at some time no matter what, but due to the pressing of the project, the benefits of the new industry sprang up soon after the catalyst. 

Looking foward, especially seeing what a bump centered economy has come to wrought, you can trace everything back to the greenspan rate cuts after 9-11 (housing price spike, loose lending standards, eventual bubble burst and collapse) it seems that we should have a growth centered economy.  Big ideas like strengthining our countries infrastructure and power grid, new solar and wind farms, new technologies to be tried and tested, then sold around the world with a US label.  This is long term sustainable economic growth, not the cheap and reverable bump gained by a tax cut.