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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (43359)	5/23/2010 7:08:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

And they DID NOT GO DOWN when tax rates were reduced (but borrowing remained unhindered....) The issue isn't if they went down, but rather if they or (I'll just say government spending to make it simplifier and use "it") it was lower than it otherwise would have been. If you base jump with a parachute you accelerate, your going faster than you where before you jumped even though you have a device designed to slow you down. But that hardly means that the parachute didn't work. Without the parachute you would have fallen much faster. In this case its the same. Spending increased anyway, but measuring that doesn't give us the answer that starve the beast didn't work. Because simply measuring spending isn't enough, we have to measure the change in spending, and compare it to the change in spending we would have had if there was no tax cut. Now its possible that the change is exactly the same. That the tax cut indeed had not effect on controlling spending. But you can't tell that just from looking at how much spending changed. You need to speculate on how much it would have changed without the tax cut and then compare the two. There is no way to get an answer here without speculation.