Jonathan Chait analyzes the Marco Rubio tax proposals and points out that what Rubio wants is a quadruple dose of medicine that has always failed in the past…
The Republican Party's commitment to regressive, debt-financed tax cuts as its central domestic policy goal dates back to the 1970s, when Jack Kemp and William Roth first proposed large-scale income-tax cuts, which became the basis for Ronald Reagan's 1981 program. At the time, there was at least theoretical justification to cut the top rate, which stood at 70 percent. Subsequent events have not been so kind. The Reagan-era recovery benefited from a bounce-back from a Fed-induced recession that crushed the inflation of the 1970s, but it did not see an increase in the underlying growth rate.
Events since then have looked worse and worse for the anti-tax cause. Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate to 39.6 percent and, confounding unanimous conservative predictions that a recession would ensue, enjoyed an economic boom. George W. Bush cut taxes and, in spite of conservative certainty that faster growth would follow, the economy instead grew tepidly before collapsing in a worldwide meltdown after the housing bubble popped. When Obama opposed extending the portion of those tax cuts that applied to income over $250,000, conservatives insisted it would harm growth. Instead, economic growth has accelerated.
In 2012, Mitt Romney promised that, if elected, by the end of his first term he would bring the unemployment rate down to 6 percent. With 15 months left to go, that unemployment rate now stands at 5 percent. The recovery from 2008 may not be as fast as anybody would like, but it is faster than the recovery in any other country that endured the financial crisis. What factual analysis of these events in any way suggests that a return to regressive, debt-financed tax cutting is the tonic the economy needs?