Tax Cuts Are Sacred

As exemplified in the comments threads of the last couple of posts, rightie economic “theory” rests on a number of bedrock beliefs that have nothing to do with the real world, but which righties believe to the foundations of their souls. These beliefs cannot be questioned These include —

  • Government is to the economy what a tick is to a dog. Money paid in taxes is lost forever to the national economy.
  • Government jobs are not real jobs. Wages paid to government employees are not real wages. When government employees use their wages to buy stuff, it doesn’t count as a stimulus for business to make more stuff. Only stuff bought with wages from a private sector job can do that.
  • Free markets are forces of nature that self-regulate and grow the economy as long as they aren’t regulated.
  • Private enterprise does everything more efficiently than government bureaucracies.

And now we have one more,

  • Tax cuts to the rich are sacred.

The immortal words of Senator Jon Kyl:

“[Y]ou should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes,” Jon Kyl said on Fox News Sunday. “Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to — if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

This was said yesterday on Fox News Sunday. According to Steve Benen, Kyle was responding to a question from Chris Wallace.

Wallace, to his credit, raised a good point — the “Republican growth agenda” is predicated on keeping “the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.” Wallace said this would cost $678 billion over 10 years, and asked Kyl how the GOP would pay for them. Kyl dodged the question, and talked about how great those tax cuts were.

So, Wallace asked again how the cuts would be paid for. Kyl responded, “You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. [etc.]

The Bush tax cuts are the single biggest cause of the current budget deficit. It is an even bigger cause than the Iraq War, and far bigger than all the “entitlement” programs put together when you consider there was a budget surplus before Bush was elected.

Given their recent whining about the deficit, they must have one more rule:

  • Budget deficits caused by tax cuts don’t count. Budget deficits caused by wars don’t count most of the time. However, domestic spending by government causes a different kind of deficit that does count.

As Ezra Klein says, “This sort of comment is how you tell people who care about the deficit apart from people who are interested in exploiting fears of the deficit to shrink the size of government.”

If you can think of any more wingnut economic rules, please add them.