Matthew Yglesias
offers a primer, using an unfortunate Irving Kristol quote
unearthed by Brad DeLong as a jumping-off point: "The presence of
a major ideological movement in the United States of America
dedicated to the dual propositions that taxes must never go up,
and that government expenditures don't need to relate to
government revenue in any real way as long as the Republican
Party is in charge simply makes it almost impossible for the
country to be governed in a responsible manner."
Well. Certainly Republicans deserve criticism for increasingly
substituting borrow-and-spend economics for the Democrats'
tax-and-spend economics. But one might at least point out that
the national debt declined as a percentage of GDP under Clinton
without returning to pre-Reagan tax rates. Or that
Barack Obama
explicitly promised to reduce federal revenues "to below the
levels that prevailed under Ronald Reagan" while increasing
federal spending. Or that the economic picture looked quite a bit
different after the policy mix intended to whip stagflation went
into effect, a mix that included Reagan's tax cuts.
The political class' "rather cavalier attitude toward the budget
deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems" has been
bipartisan and transideological. So has been the realization that
at least some of the basic observations of supply-side economics
are sound.
