A Real No-Brainer

Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 12, 2011 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

The Democrats, David Brooks claims, “have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.” Not if you know your recent history.

“Congress is locked in yet another rending slugfest over tax increases,” the Heritage Foundation reported on November 14, 1983. “In one corner is Senate Finance Committee Chairman Robert Dole (R-Kan) who set off the bruising campaign last year that resulted in a $99 billion tax hike.”

“That package promised three dollars in budget cuts for every one dollar in tax increases. It turned out to be a lemon. The actual result was 21 cents in spending increases for every one dollar in tax hikes.”

President Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, made a similar miscalculation that may have hastened his retirement from the presidency when he lost his reelection bid. He too agreed to a budget deal with congressional Democrats, who at the time controlled both Houses of Congress.

In 1991, three economists scored that fateful budget deal in a study for the minority staff of the congressional Joint Economic Committee. “Concern about the effect of new taxes on the economy, or on the spending habits of public officials, was given short shrift by pragmatism,” they wrote. “The crowning triumph of this strategy was the 1990 budget agreement, which raised taxes $160 billion, supposedly to reduce the deficit.”

“However, the facts contained in this study and elsewhere show that Federal spending actually accelerated after the 1990 tax increases were enacted, and budget deficits have hit record levels.”

[rlmorel]

Ping

[Venturer]

Give Democrats a dollar in new tax’s , they will spend $3.00.