Hating Taxes, Ezra Klein Explains.

Why does the GOP hate taxes so much? - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

I love this guy. He asks questions and searches out relevant answers. How many of us regular citizens have ever found experts who would ask or answer these? We're much more likely to read whatever claptrap is published by our particular side of the political spectrum and rant about the talking points derived therefrom. So friends...

Ezra writes:

I spent much of yesterday asking right-leaning economists to walk me through two quotes that seemed to summarize the Republican Party’s argument against taxes. The first came from Boehner on the “Today” show. “The fact is you can’t tax the people we expect to invest in the economy and create jobs,” he said. The second came from Louis Woodhill, a member of the anti-tax Club for Growth’s leadership council. “To stimulate GDP growth, a tax cut has to cut the marginal tax rates upon which the decision-makers in the economy base their decisions to work and, above all, to invest.”

There you have it... the Randian philosophy that the "producers" must be in the lead because they and only they can drive the economy. Their choices must be incentivized hence lower taxes and no tax raises ... ever. Unstated though, is the value of cutting "tax expenditures." Klien again:

But let’s say we cut the deduction for your health-care insurance, or your mortgage interest. That raises your taxes, and you may not like it. But it doesn’t give you a reason to work less. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Hubbard didn’t feel Boehner was giving sufficient weight to this distinction. “When I heard the speaker,” he said, “I didn’t just hear him rule out marginal increases. I heard him rule out cutting tax expenditures, too.” To Hubbard, that didn’t make much sense. Cutting tax expenditures wasn’t like raising tax rates. It wouldn’t be apocalyptic for the economy. It wouldn’t keep the decision-makers from investing. It might even keep them from over-investing in things we want less of, like expensive health-care insurance policies and homes.

Not exactly raising taxes, but it does have the same effect. This is the irrational part of the GOP argument. The no new taxes ever argument is expanding to include all forms of income streams available to the government.

It's particularly insane because of the laboratory experiment in economics conducted by the United States in the early '90's.

Leonard Burman isn’t a Republican economist, but he is a tax expert. He was actually deputy undersecretary for tax analysis in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department. And when I reached him for comment, he found the whole conversation baffling. “You can build these models where people are very sensitive to changes in taxes,” he said, “ but in practice, there’s scant evidence of it actually working out that way. And lucky for us. If we really needed to get the tax code just right in order for the economy to grow, we’d have been in a depression for the last 40 years.”

The bottom line, he says, is that these theories were tested, and recently. “In the 1990s, we raised taxes, particularly on the rich. And a lot of these people were saying our tax increases were going to kill the economy. But remember what actually happened? We got rid of our deficits and the economy grew really robustly for 10 years. And what if it happened again? We might get rid of our deficits and the economy would grow really robustly for another 10 years. Maybe it’s good for the economy to actually get the deficit under control.”

Thanks Ezra. I needed that.

More work to do.