Quote:
Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
But that doesn't ,mean "Starving the Beast" doesn't work.
|
I thought that's what this guy did his analysis for:
Quote:
|
Niskanen has crunched the numbers between 1981 and 2005, testing for a relationship between tax cuts and government spending, and controlling for levels of unemployment, since these affect spending and taxes independently. Niskanen's result punctures his own party's dogma. Tax cuts are associated with increases in government spending.
|
If you think economics is a science, and you have a theory like "cutting taxes forces reduced government spending," and you test that theory by comparing tax cuts to government spending, and you control for the relevant variables (maybe he didn't?), and the results directly contradict your theory, don't you have a problem?
It's a different thing to say that politicians shouldn't spend like drunken sailors. But for quite a while now we've heard how politicians can spend like drunken sailors while still cutting taxes because cutting taxes reduces government spending generally -- FACT.
