Trickle-down’s middle-class massacre: Failure of conservative economics should discredit these bankrupt ideas forever
"the trickle-down worldview has impacted policymaking for more than three decades. Not only is trickle-down still lodged firmly in place, but since the Great Recession, adherents of supply side have doubled down on their policies. The rhetoric supply-siders use may be shifting to be more supportive of the middle class, but their policies have gotten more extreme.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran against Obama in 2012 by proposing tax cuts for the wealthy that were far larger than the cuts enacted by President George W. Bush. The budget proposal by the House Republicans in 2013 would have provided bigger tax cuts to the wealthy than even the Romney plan. Further, these federal proposals for additional tax cuts for the rich would likely have required tax increases on the middle class, according to a number of analyses. Similarly, Republican governors like North Carolina’s Pat McCrory, Kansas’s Sam Brownback, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and New Jersey’s Chris Christie have recently proposed policies that cut taxes for businesses and the wealthy, but raise them on the middle class. In contrast, supply-side proposals of the past cut taxes most dramatically for the wealthy, but still reduced taxes for most everyone.
That supply-side supporters have become even more dogmatic in the aftermath of the Great Recession is not particularly surprising. American history shows that proponents of the dominant theory often do not admit the error of their ways, but rather become even more strident as evidence mounts that their logic has failed."
