Friday, September 7, 2007

Supply-Side Follies

A lot of online ink has been spilled within the last few days regarding Jonathan Chait's new book "exposing" the supply-side thinking of Republicans. I hope he enjoyed burning down the straw man of supply-side because that's all he did.

There are a lot of serious reasons that tax cuts are good -- you don't have to believe that revenue will increase as a result of cutting taxes to believe that tax cuts are good in a given situation. Take a look at this story from the Economist economics blog.

If you want to say that Republicans are uninformed about economics and make stupid arguments, that's not exactly breaking news. I'm sure you can point to examples of Republicans saying any number of stupid things are any number of topics. So are a lot of Democrats -- economic literacy is not a requirement to be in politics. However, it's more useful to engage the legitimate arguments if you want to shed any light on a topic. It's bad argument to say that "This point that your side sometimes makes is wrong, therefore, you're not worth listening to at all."

You're throwing the baby out with the bath water if you ignore the fact that tax cuts can expand the economy, or, for that matter, the moral argument that the money belongs to the people and the government should use it efficiently.

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