Amen. Nothing irritates me more than when folks who are supposedly on our side miss the opportunity to say this.
It’s a no duh. After all, when a business wants to spur activity, the RUN A SALE. That’s what a tax cut is: a “sale” on economic growth. Let’s cut taxes and RUN A SALE ON GROWTH!!
“The only way to increase revenue is to CUT TAXES.”
Reagan’s economic team included spending cuts in their program for good reason. They didn’t believe that cutting taxes would increase total tax revenue. What they did believe is that economic growth spurred by the lowered tax rates would recover a large portion of the revenue loss caused by the tax cuts. And that is what happened.
You can read a first hand description of this from Martin Anderson in his book “Revolution”. Look for the chapter “the myth of the supply-siders”. Anderson was one of Ronald Reagan’s longest serving advisors and was an architect of Reaganomics.
What fans of the idea that tax cuts increased total revenue overlook is that there was a good deal of stimulus going on from deficits in the 80s. Deficit spending by definition is an old Keynesian nostrum, not a supply-side effect, and its impact has to be factored out when trying to isolate the contribution of tax cuts themselves. An accessible study of this was done by Lawrence Lindsey in his book ‘The Growth Experiment’. You can’t just subtract the total tax haul of 1981 from that of 1989 and ascribe all the increase to tax cuts, despite the repeated claims of the Limbaugh/Hannity Radio School of Economics.