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Thursday, September 10, 2015

Jeb's Tax Cut Plan Shows GOP Hasn't Learned Brownback Lesson

His tax plan is his brother's tax plan on steroids.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/jeb-tells-us-secret-of-4-gdp-his.html

It is also very similar to Mitt Romney's 2012 proposals that went over so well.

"In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran on a plan to cut income tax rates for the highest earners and for corporations. Sixty percent of voters disagreed with him, saying rates should — at a minimum — go up on people earning $250,000 a year or more."

"And that difference showed up at the polls. Fifty-five percent of voters said the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy, with Romney losing that group by 45 percentage points. A majority said Romney's policies would mostly help those wealthy people; Romney lost that group by nearly 9 to 1."

"These numbers may matter for Jeb Bush, because his new tax plan, unveiled late Tuesday, includes a lot of the same ideas that Democrats hammered Romney for."

"Bush, like Romney, wants to cut the top rate to 28 percent, from the current 39.6 percent. Romney wanted to cut the corporate rate to 25 percent, and now Bush wants to cut it to 20. Romney wanted to end the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, which almost exclusively affect higher-income earners. So does Bush."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/09/09/how-to-tell-whether-jeb-bushs-new-tax-plan-offers-something-new/

He has a few sops to the poor like raising the EITC-as his brother's tax cut did. Still the overall effect of the tax cut was regressive as Jeb's is.

It will also like his brother's policy did, explode the deficit.

The tax-reform plan that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush detailed on Wednesday combines a faith in supply-side economics with a handful of measures meant to court populists and the middle class. It builds on the tax plan of the GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, and it is projected to grow federal budget deficits in the same manner as the tax policies of the last Republican president, Bush’s brother, George W. Bush.

Jeb Bush’s plan would cut rates for the rich, though not as ambitiously as many of his rivals’ proposals. It would end a favored break for Wall Street and free an estimated 15 million more lower-income Americans from paying federal income tax. By Bush’s advisers’ estimates, it would add between $1.2 trillion and $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, depending on how much additional economic activity is spurred by the plan.

The proposal comes as Bush, the former governor of Florida, attempts to regain lost ground to GOP front-runner Donald Trump. It is the latest sign of how, outside of Trump, nearly all of the Republican hopefuls are betting that the best way to reach struggling middle-class voters is a modified version of a long-held conservative formula: promising to unleash rapid economic growth by lowering tax rates, especially at the top, and by simplifying the tax code."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/jeb-bushs-new-tax-plan-could-cost-34-trillion-over-next-decade/2015/09/09/f3a8fffc-5741-11e5-b8c9-944725fcd3b9_story.html

Yes, we're back to the alleged superlative gains of dynamic scoring.

I doubt this is going to be the way to cut into Trump's huge lead either. Trump surely hasn't been hurt by coming out for a less regressive sounding tax plan that would raise the top rate on capital gains.

But we've seen this same tax cutting mania at the state level with Sam Brownback who had claimed that dynamic scoring showed the cuts would pay for themselves and ended up having to raise taxes again to close the deficit.

http://wonkette.com/588677/gov-sam-brownback-only-raised-taxes-on-poors-so-it-doesnt-count-right

http://cjonline.com/news/state/2015-09-07/fact-meter-gov-sam-brownback-shifts-tax-policy-narrative-burying-revenue

Of course, unlike the states the federal government doesn't have to have a balanced budget though the GOP has acted like it does during the Obama years.

Yglesias points out that there are three ways Jeb could pay for the huge deficits of his tax plan.

1. With spending cuts for the poor.

2. Unspecified loophole closing.

3. Just watch the deficit balloon and say with Dick Cheney 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter.'

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9283985/jeb-bush-tax-cut-plan

Based on recent GOP Administration the answer is 3 while the GOP is in office but call for 1 when a Democrat is in the White House-Clinton had obliged them after the Reagan-Bush deficits of 12 years.
Then W exploded them again. They were outraged when they weren't able to get Obama to entirely take the bait.
Choice 2 on the other hand is just what you say to reassure the public during the campaign-as they never want to discuss just which loopholes they have in mind. 
So it's really 3 in GOP Administrations, and 1 in Democratic ones. In any case Jeb says he will abolish Obamacare to pay for it so this is a tax hike on the poor. No matter how you look at it, the effects of his tax cuts like his brother's would be highly regressive. 
As for 4% GDP there is no evidence that tax cuts have very large effects on GDP either way. 
P.S. I have to take issue with Yglesias here:
"This style of Republican governance went out of style immediately upon Barack Obama's inauguration, and it would be awkward to pivot from lambasting Obama's deficits to proposing much-larger deficits. But then again, it would also be awkward for liberals to go back to arguing that big budget deficits are a problem!"
Actually no. Democrats like Krugman have been pretty clear that cutting the deficit during a recession or slow recovery are a mistake. The point is to look at the structural deficit.

There's no contradiction for Democrats to argue that overly large structural deficits allocated towards tax cuts for the rich are wrongheaded.

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