Tax cut rhetoric and government revenues

And so the 24 hour election cycle continues.  Even though we are still a year and a half out of the 2012 presidential elections, Republican hopefuls are kickstarting their campaigns with intentions on limiting Barack Obama to a single term as president.  Several candidates are hoping to harness the populist power of the Tea Party, looking to maximize on frustrations over a struggling economy and government spending.  Issues such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and spending cuts are fueling the conservative fire, while others have been nearly altogether forgotten (the word education was not mentioned once during the first Republican candidates debate).  Most candidates (ABC news provides a list of contenders here) are lobbying to champion themselves as the Tea-Party-Friendliest, including upstart Michele Bachmann and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

While many shifts and surprises will change the direction of the campaign trail in the coming months, a safe bet for most candidates is to wield boldly Reagan-esque economic ideology, one that energized economically conservative bases last fall and remains promising in the midst of a poor job market.  Tim Pawlenty has done so, calling for an $8 trillion tax cut.  Citing Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economic policy, he claims that history has shown that tax cuts will actually result in no decrease in revenues.  According to Bruce Bartlett of Capital Gains and Games, Pawlenty is totally wrong.  Bartlett should know - he worked as an economic adviser for Reagan and G.H.W. Bush.  Here he shows how Reagan's cuts did not pay for themselves.  Nor, economists agree (an uncommon occurrence), have the Bush cuts.

Pawlenty is at best misinformed, at worst he is manipulating the truth as he jockeys for position in the coming year.  This brings me back to my frustrations with the current conservative deification of Reagan.  My libertarian friend Thomas Pearson will point out that the federal government grew more under Reagan than any president since Roosevelt.  And while his early tax cuts are the legend that fuels Glenn Beck, everyone seems to have forgotten that Reagan raised taxes eleven times.