AHC: GOP Still Says "No Tax Cuts Until Budget Is Balanced"

Dwight D. Eisenhower at a news conference in February 1953:

"And now, our last subject: taxes. In spite of some things that I have seen in the papers over the past 8 or 9 months, I personally have never promised a reduction in taxes. Never.

"What I have said is, reduction of taxes is a very necessary objective of government--that if our form of economy is to endure, we must not forget private incentives and initiative and the production that comes from it. Therefore, the objective of tax reduction is an absolutely essential one, and must be attained in its proper order.

"But I believe, and I think this can be demonstrated as fact by economists, both on the basis of history and on their theoretical and abstract reasoning, that until the deficit is eliminated from our budget, there is no hope of keeping our money stable. It is bound to continue to be cheapened, and if it is cheapened, then the necessary expenses of government each year cost more because the money is worth less. Therefore, there is no end to the inflation; there is finally no end to taxation; and the eventual result would, of course, be catastrophe.

"So, whether we are ready to face the job this minute or any other time, the fact is there must be balanced budgets before we are again on a safe and sound system in our economy. That means, to my mind, that we cannot afford to reduce taxes, reduce income, until we have in sight a program of expenditures that shows that the factors of income and of outgo will be balanced. Now that is just to my mind sheer necessity.

"I have as much reason as anyone else to deplore high taxes. I certainly am going to work with every bit of energy I have towards their reduction. And I applaud the efforts of the people in Congress that are going in that way. But I merely want to point out that unless we go at it in the proper sequence, I do not believe that taxes will be lowered..." http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9623

AHC: The GOP never departs from this point of view. No Laffer Curves (i.e.," tax cuts will pay for themselves"), no "starve the beast" (i.e., "if we cut taxes enough, spending cuts will *have* to follow eventually") no "deficits don't matter." Just Ike's old-fashioned "no tax cuts until the budget is balanced."
 
Electing George Bush the Elder in 1980 will go a long way towards this, I think.

That's true, but the supply-side wing is still a thing. It needs to be discredited for the GOP to support fiscal responsibility

So, perhaps Ford wins in 1976 and subsequently assassinated and the recession is blamed on Dole's low-tax economics?
 
That's true, but the supply-side wing is still a thing. It needs to be discredited for the GOP to support fiscal responsibility

So, perhaps Ford wins in 1976 and subsequently assassinated and the recession is blamed on Dole's low-tax economics?

Discredited as in losing an election or having a bad administration?

In the latter case, let's say that a supply-sider (Kemp?) wins the nomination in 1988 and-- for the sake of argument --takes the general election, too. Assuming that the Bush Administration has not caused too many butterflies in SW Asian geopolitics, just have that supply-sider preside over the Gulf War or its equivalent, impacting oil prices and bringing about a recession.

Is a recession enough to discredit supply-side politics forever and ever and ever? Maybe not, but it'd certainly confine that set of policy positions to Ted Cruz-esque movement conservatives.
 
The problem is that there's a natural constituency for people who want to see taxes cut (the people whose taxes will get cut). On the other hand, there isn't much of a constituency for balanced budgets; plenty of people say they want them, but few are actively lobbying for them to nearly the same extent (and for good reason, as many economists from across the spectrum would argue). Generally, the party out of power warns about ballooning national debt, and once in power, switches to "deficits don't matter." Budget balancing by its nature requires either tax increases (unpopular with the people who expect their taxes to increase) or spending cuts (unpopular with whoever will be affected by the cuts); both options are politically costly and don't win enough support to balance the political costs.

Even if an administration cuts taxes and has lousy economics, the response would not be "therefore we shouldn't prioritize tax cuts over deficit reduction"; it would be "obviously, the X administration cut them the wrong way/not enough/did other things that caused problems/was a victim of circumstances." Counterfactuals are inherently unfalsifiable. For a real world example, look at the George W. Bush administration, which was massively unpopular and seen as a disaster on economics (due to the Great Recession), and yet that hasn't discredited the prioritization of tax cuts above deficit reduction. It's hard to imagine an administration being seen as failing worse than Bush's, and yet that didn't have the desired effect. Likewise various state governments (e.g. Kansas at the moment), which have seen similar dynamics play out.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
The idea generally is that a spending cut and a tax cut can cancel each other out. The problem is that the Republicans generally aren't willing to cut spending, especially while being the face of those cuts. The idea of finding the cuts in the discretionary budget is quite popular among the think tanks, but not the Congressmen who have districts full of food stamp using swing voters. Finding cuts among the military budget is popular among the Libertarians, but not the defense hawks, or more importantly, the people who have a submarine factory in their district that employs thousands of people. Reforming social security is popular among the Republicans with a desire to put country first, but not among those who want to put their careers first.

The basic cut taxes/cut spending solution can work on the state level. Maryland this past year was able to cut taxes for homeowners while finding modest cuts in the motor administration budget to pay for them. Kansas on the the other hand cut taxes for everyone and did not find enough spending cuts to balance the budget or even to keep things afloat. It was a disaster. Connecticut is raising taxes on everyone and not cutting down on bloated government programs, which is why Dan Malloy has Brownback-esque popularity figures.

The truth of the matter is that people like government programs that work well and work for them, but they don't want to pay for them. This is why the Progressives pretend that taxing rich people more is the catch all tonic for fiscal issues, and why conservatives pretend that tax cuts create enough growth to pay for everything. People don't want to pay taxes and don't want things cut. Candidates that promise to raise taxes (Walter Mondale and Bernie Sanders) lose, while candidates that promise to cut things (Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz) end up losing as well.
 
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