Jeb! Bush! Tax! Cut! Defense – My Candidate for its Main Lie

Greg Mankiw hearts the tax cut proposal from Jeb! No surprise there. He also links to an incredible piece of dishonesty from the Usual Suspects:

For scoring purposes, however, to be conservative, we calculate that the tax and regulatory components of the Governor’s economic plan will strengthen GDP by a total of about 8 percent over a decade, with 5 percentage points coming from the tax reform plan and 3 percentage points from regulatory reforms. On an annual basis, that equates to approximately 0.5 percentage points of higher economic growth per year directly attributable to the tax policy changes outlined in the balance of the White Paper. And an additional 0.3 percentage points of annual growth arising from the regulatory reforms, which we understand the Governor will be outlining in detail in the period ahead.

I could get snarky and note that adding this alleged 0.8% to the current 2% is not nearly 4% so one has to wonder what fuzzy math the Team Republican candidates are using. Their supply side Laffers are warmed over from 35 years ago but I’ll let others have fun mocking this intellectual garbage. Permit me to focus on the bottom of page 3 where they noted that the Administration had high hopes for their fiscal stimulus in 2009. Here in my view was their greatest lie:

output has grown at about half of consensus’ projections from June 2009 until present. The weaker than expected economic performance should cause policymakers to revisit their economic programs and policies. They have not.

It is true that the recovery has been disappointing but the reason is clear – fiscal policy did change towards stupid fiscal austerity driven largely by Republicans. This statement alone should disqualify the Team Republican economists from the policy debate. But yea – I know. Republicans lying to us has been the norm for the last 35 years.