Re: "The only cost is the spending."
You mean the extra BORROWING, and the interest on that new debt. That builds-in future mandated costs. (When reductions in federal revenue caused by reductions in taxes *are not offset* by matching reductions in spending, the difference is BORROWED).
Which is exactly what I already said: "OF COURSE they [tax reductions] are completely affordable! Just so long as one CUTS SPENDING to make up for whatever revenue will be lost (even after assuming dynamical "Laffer curve" effects partially replace some of that statically lost revenue) SO THAT you are not just expanding the deficit and BORROWING THE DIFFERENCE (thus adding interest costs to a climbing debt pile).
Re: Note that point has no connection whatsoever with "deficits don't matter", so the last part of your post is irrelevant to the point.
You are clearly wrong about that, Tim.
The last part of my post that you refer to was this: But this line of snake oil from the likes of Cheney (and now McConnell and some other liars) that "DEFICITS DON'T MATTER" is surely one of the most pernicious lies ever told to the American people.
And that was an IMPORTANT POINT SPECIFICALLY RAISED by David Stockman (a point he has raised over and over again throughout his political life since he was Reagan's budget director) in the article I originally posted to you --- whether you prefer to skip past it, or ignore it or not, Stockman went on for paragraph after paragraph laying out that exact point:
...The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.
In 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts, matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine.
Soon, the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion.
Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.
By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy....
Stockman made *four* points (numbered) in his opinion piece --- and that one was listed as number TWO.
So it would just seem silly to try to pretend that that was not one of the original points when so much of the article is taken up expounding on it.
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