Not really, since the CBO projected that they were responsible for roughly half of each year's budget deficit, and since most of the yearly deficit increase was due to revenues rather than spending.
I may be wrong on this but the CBO projections do not account for any "supply-side" dynamics - that is tax-cuts->GDP growth->greater taxable income. I don't know of any metric or algorithm that can measure this. If there were one - we would have "societal optimum tax rates" and the D&D would be relegated to gay-marriage and abortion debates (where you and me would probably actually agree on everything). I suppose that's why supply-side is a theory. We do have greater tax revenue. Even then (if you read my previous posts here), I think the WSJ guy is off-base and freely admit that he is most probably a right-wing partisan (just like I still think Krugman is a partsan - ).
Actually, they have to an extent, as conservatives, in order to make the numbers look better forced them to adopted so-called "dynamic scoring" several years ago - i.e. projecting certain rates of growth infinitely into the future. As far as supply side being an economic theory - I don't think anybody really gives it much credence in a serious academic way - its chief proponents are TV talking heads like Lawrence Kudlow and such - and their theories ("deficits cure themselves") are outlandishly ridiculous and have proven, time and time again, to be wildly off base. There are serious right wing economists who favor tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts, like Milton Friedman - but he's not dumb enough to push the supply side garbage as pitched in the 80's and as again in Bush II. He just wants the government to starve itself down to Hoover-era size. That's a different thing than the "buy now, pay never" approach of the supply siders.
Thx. I did not know that. Off hand I would think that any metric designed to measure supply-side growth would be extremely difficult to validate without the help of robots. While I do think that lower-tax rates on the rich do, in fact, increase the money supply, lower interest rates, and spur investment, etc. - I think good old "demand-side" economics (ie. tax-cuts for poor-mids) is more equitable and "measurable" (not to mention more politically expedient). A dollar in tax-cuts for a poor person probably means GDP+$1 (especially with deficit spending ). To me, it seems that supply-side, trickle-down types of gains only occur in the murky long-term. Certainly not long enough for GW to claim any credit for the "recovery" due to the upper-class portion of his tax cuts.
