"Those of us who favor tax cuts can now look proudly at the recent record of tax payments. According to the Treasury Department's monthly report, tax receipts were up 11.2 percent for the first seven months of Fiscal 2006. That is $137 billion. In Fiscal 2005 tax receipts were up 14.6 percent, which is $274 billion. These increases come as a great surprise to those Democrats and Republicans who insist tax cuts cause deficits. Holed up over at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), their minions issue predictions of puny revenue growth following tax cuts that are always gloomy and always wrong. The CBO's recent predictions for Fiscal 2006 were $76 billion for the whole year for individual tax receipts and $24 billion for corporate receipts. Seven months into the year the respective figures are already $56 billion and $40 billion.
"Unburdened by high taxes, the rich paid more in taxes. By lowering marginal tax rates we have encouraged economic vigor and put more money in the government's hands. This we call Supply-Side Economics. Yet many Republicans remain agnostic, and many more Democrats are contemptuous of it. This is a cultural problem. In the culture of economic ideas, many on Capitol Hill will not look at the evidence of the past two decades. They are living in an era of great prosperity and do not know how they arrived at it."
Perhaps, it is not so much that Democrats do not understand the real world outcomes of leaving a worker's or investor's money in his/her own pockets so that the individual can exercise his/her "right to choose" how it is utilized.
More likely, it is that Democrats find it easier to keep poor voters "on the plantation" (and you know what I mean--roll eyes) by promises of increasing taxes on those wealthy folks they love to beat up on when they're campaigning.
(Never mind that the Kerrys, the Edwardses, the Kennedys, the Hollywood stars, et al control enormous wealth themselves.)
In the meantime, 2008's Democratic "golden boy" is establishing a name for himself "studying poverty." You'd think his time would be better spent studying wealth, and the means of acquiring it, in order to help those poor folks he claims to have known back in Moore County, North Carolina (although that county, in 2002, ranked 5th in NC in per capita income, according to U. S. Dept. of Commerce, BEA analysis of May 2002).
Thankfully, America's Founders spent more time understanding the moral philosopher Adam Smith's ideas about economics than they did figuring out ways to purchase votes and gain political power by transfering income from those who worked and earned it to those who did not.
The author has no idea what he's talking about. Reductions in marginal tax rates and putting more money in the government's hands are not the defining characteristics of supply-side economics.