Tag: george buch

Income tax cuts for the wealthy will liberate the U.S. economy to create jobs and generate revenue and shrink the deficit. That line has become a policy standard on the right and a talking point repeated on stumps all across the nation. It is a cornerstone of the GOP Ryan Budget plan being pushed on Capitol Hill. Yet analysis and statistics and personal anecdotes pile high and deep against that tack as an effective real-world national economic policy. GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who led the state down a path toward deficit swampland, is the latest to try to rework history to suit the tax-cut narrative. As Dave Weigel at Slate points out, Pawlenty's recent big economic speech twists and turns and makes a dead stop at the Bush years, when "tax cuts for the wealthy" national budget policy went into full effect and revenues plummeted and the deficit skyrocketed and the economy withered.