Since when was supply-side ever really in place? Sure, Reagan talked about it, but was it ever really implemented properly?
That sounds suspiciously like the claim that communism was never implemented properly.
Reagan cut marginal tax rates greatly.
That was the core idea, and it worked well.
Since then the dealing has been on much smaller margins. Bush made a significant temporary reduction, but much smaller than Reagans, and median household income did rise again until the last bubble burst.
The real problem now isn’t actual rates, even marginal ones, but structural impediments such as regulations and their associated litigation and fear of liability. These represent a much broader based hidden tax and have increased without restraint regardless of the administration. The last serious effort at pruning them was late in the Carter administration, continued by Reagan, when much of the overhead, mainly on freighting and transportation was reduced. This contributed to the Reagan boom, and to date.
This sort of regulatory and litigious overhead is not reflected in crude tax burden calculations.
Best statement so far. Supply side works to drive economic growth if and only if government spending remains stable as a percent of GDP. There in lies the problem. Not even Reagan was able to reign in government spending and we all know what has happened since then. Consider this also, can one argue that the advent of the global economy and so called free trade driven the new capital from supply side overseas? Did supply side do nothing but grow the economies of the third world?
Reagan came the closest, so it's been over 20 years. Almost all politicians including most Republicans hate supply side economics, because it generally benefits the private sector and makes people less dependent on government.
Cutting tax rates to propel the economy is the cornerstone of supply-side economics, a discipline with which Dole, to put it mildly, has never been identified. In the 1980s, he used to joke that he had good news and bad news. The good news: A bus carrying supply-siders had gone over a cliff. The bad news? "There were three empty seats." Ha ha.
The only real supply side economics the last century was tried by Warren Harding...
The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent. No wonder, then, that Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — falsely characterized as a supporter of laissez-faire economics — urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover was ignored.
Instead of “fiscal stimulus,” Harding cut the government’s budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. The rest of Harding’s approach was equally laissez-faire. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third. The Federal Reserve’s activity, moreover, was hardly noticeable. As one economic historian puts it, “Despite the severity of the contraction, the Fed did not move to use its powers to turn the money supply around and fight the contraction.”2 By the late summer of 1921, signs of recovery were already visible. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and was only 2.4 percent by 1923.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods125.html
the combination of DEREGULATION-aggressively cutting the size of Federal Government...and DETAXATION has never been done since. Kennedy and Reagan came the closest...but only via tax cuts for the most part.
Unfortunately entitlement programs exist only as the principle means by which to force Keynesian policies of borrowing upon the country. They’re good for the bankers.