“That is factually incorrect. Revenues increased throughout the 80’s. Just like they did in the 60’s following Kennedy’s tax cut”
Sorry, this is subject that I happen to know very well and you are mistaken.
You can’t simply look at the gross tax receipts alone and attribute all of the increase to the stimulus effect of marginal tax rate cuts. That’s what Rush and Hannity and everyone else parrots, but then those parrots don’t sit around reading boring economic studies.
You have to account for the normal business cycle, the stimulus effect of deficit spending, the growth trajectory of the economy due to population increase, and other such factors. The increase in tax revenue is hardly due to rate reductions alone.
The contribution of marginal tax rate reductions was the subject of a study conducted by Lawrence Lindsey when he was at Harvard. Lindsey is a Republican economist, he had worked on Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers as Senior Staff Economist for Tax Policy, he’s a fan of the Reagan program, so you’re not going to find a more enthusiastic study than his.
His study accounted for all of the factors that you fail to account for because unless you read Lindsey’s study you probably wouldn’t think of them.
Lindsey’s study, which was published as The Growth Experiment, was a complex regression analysis, verified what Reagan’s economists had predicted in the first place. The marginal rate reductions would stimulate enough growth to recover 2/3 of every dollar that the tax cuts “lost” if there was no growth effect. There was a growth effect, as expected, but the rate cuts themselves didn’t increase the Treasury’s income as Gilder and Wanniski and other popularizers of supply side often claimed, and which get endlessly repeated 35 years later.
The fact show revenues grew during that period so you are not really making any sense. Dollars don't come into the treasury marked "from tax cut", "from stimulation" "Form population growth". The mathematical facts are revenue grew 50% in those years 1980-1988.