Clearly there was no effective restraint upon the growth of government at all... considering that the politician simply BORROWED whatever funds they wanted and continued to grow the government and spend.
Not clear at all. Spending isn't a fixed amount.
Sure the politicians borrowed money, but the didn't necessarily borrow more than they otherwise would have. You could have had higher taxes with equal deficits. Failing that you could have more borrowing than you would have without the tax cuts, but not enough additional borrowing to increase the amount that was spent.
For the answer to be really clear you can't just look at what happened, you have to speculate at what would have happened, because the question is one of the effect of the policy, not the results after the policy.
You take the spending that would have happened without the tax cuts (call it X), and subtract the spending that actually happened (Y).
If X-Y is negative, or zero, than the policy didn't work.
If X-Y is positive but extremely small, than technically the policy worked, in the sense of having some of the desired effect, but it wouldn't be considered cost effective.
If X-Y is significantly positive than the policy worked (defined as achieving its desired goal)
We know Y, we have the historical record to look at, no speculation is needed. But X requires speculation. And without some speculative estimate of X (at least in very rough terms) we can't answer the question about whether the policy worked or not.
I'd say the likely answer is somewhere in between the 2nd scenario and the third, but probably closer, perhaps much closer, to the 2nd. Likely the effect was to small to be considered worth the cost in terms of high deficits and debt. But I also considered it fairly unlikely that the effect was zero. |
