Quote:The tax plans of the Republican presidential candidates would cut federal revenues as much as $12 trillion over a decade, a post-World War II record eclipsing the deep tax cuts of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. And they would come just as America faces the costs of its aging baby-boom generation.

Quote:“One, they are enormous tax cuts relative to anything we’ve done in the past. Two, the candidates don’t specify how they’re going to pay for these tax cuts. And three, they are hugely regressive” — that is, the higher a person’s income, the bigger the tax cuts that taxpayer would receive, both in dollars and as a percentage of income.
If the candidates “ever do get around to specifying how they’re going to pay for the tax cuts,” Mr. Gale added, the budget savings are “going to come from low- and middle-income households” because those Americans benefit more than the rich from the government’s domestic spending programs.

Quote:[trickle-down theory is based on] increasing growth by cutting taxes on rich people based on the faith that they’ll create more economic activity (and create it here, not abroad). To put it mildly, that faith is misplaced. You know what happens when you cut taxes on the rich? They get richer.
[See here for more details and citations.]

Quote:For more than 25 years, the centerpiece of Republican doctrine has been the necessity of reducing taxes for upper-income Americans and an absolute opposition to higher tax revenue in any form. During President Obama’s first term, anti-deficit activists came up with a plan that they hoped would induce Republicans to abandon their fanatical opposition to higher tax revenue. First, they would get Democrats to support cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of the trade. And second, the higher revenue would come not in the form of tax-rate increases but instead by reducing loopholes and expenditures in the tax code. In theory, one could reduce enough deductions that the tax code could raise more revenue while still reducing tax rates.

In reality, Republicans refused to go for this deal. They didn’t just refuse once. They refused time after time. In 2010, the Simpson-Bowles commission came up with a plan that traded revenue-increasing tax reform for cuts to retirement programs, and leading Republicans like Paul Ryan all rejected the deal. Then, in 2011, Obama tried to strike a similar bargain with House Republicans when they held the debt ceiling hostage, but they rejected it again. That standoff led to the creation of a “supercommittee” that was tasked with creating another version of the revenue-increasing tax-reform-for-retirement-cuts deal, which predictably failed again. And then, when the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of 2012, the Obama administration hoped the pressure of an imminent tax increase would force Republicans to make some version of the deal, but once again they refused, instead using their leverage to minimize the tax hit on upper-income households.

In 2014, Dave Camp, the retiring chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, proposed a tax reform that would not have raised revenue, but would have kept revenue at current levels — a dramatic departure from party orthodoxy. But fellow Republicans treated Camp like he was a leper and have basically acted since then like it never happened. Paul Ryan recently reaffirmed that he will only support tax reform that reduces the tax burden on the rich. All of this proves conclusively that the debt-hawk theory on how Republicans could be induced to give up their fanatical opposition to higher revenue failed.

Quote:It is G.O.P. dogma that the Reagan tax cut set off an economic boom. Every Republican presidential nominee since the 1980s has promised big tax cuts and another economic surge. Tax increases, Republicans believe, are the kiss of death for the economy.

But the Reagan tax cut played only a secondary role in the 1980s boom, which wasn’t really much of a boom. Real G.D.P. grew 37.9 percent in the 1970s, compared with 36.1 percent in the 1980s. The economy felt better because inflation came down extraordinarily quickly, far more quickly than economists in 1980 thought was possible. But this was primarily a result of the Federal Reserve’s tight money policy, not taxes.

The tax cut deserves credit for softening the blow from the reduction in inflation, which brought on a sharp recession in 1981-82. But what we think of as the Reagan boom was the typical rebound from a sharp recession, just as we had seen after all previous postwar recessions. Much credit for growth in the Reagan years must go to the sharp increase in government purchases for his defense buildup.

What many Republicans also forget is that Reagan cared about deficits and supported 11 different tax increases from 1982 to 1988 that collectively took back half of the 1981 tax cut. Although many conservative economists predicted doom from the 1982 tax increase, which equaled 1 percent of G.D.P., the beginning of the boom coincided with its enactment.

These economists also predicted catastrophe from the 1993 tax increase enacted under President Bill Clinton and from the expiration of many of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2013. But in each case financial markets and the economy grew sharply afterward.

By contrast, the economy tanked during the Bush years despite numerous large tax cuts. The final proof that tax cuts are not the be-all and end-all of growth policy is the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which dropped the top income-tax rate to 28 percent. Conservative doctrine predicted an economic boom, but I don’t remember one, nor can I find one in the data.

Quote:I know something about the Reagan tax cut. In 1977, while working for Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, I drafted the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which Reagan sent to Congress in early 1981. The law cut statutory tax rates by about 25 percent across the board.

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He is the author of “Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action.”

Quote:In the face of failing public services, her tax cuts – she told Laura Kuenssberg it was “fair” to take billions from the public purse to reward the richest with £1,800 and the poorest with just £7.66 – will look perverse, and grotesquely unjust. That kind of extremism will shock most people in a country already Europe’s most unequal (bar Bulgaria). Politically, her tax cuts will contrast badly with the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s pledge to abolish billions in tax relief for the rich. Nor does cutting tax grow the economy: Ben Zaranko of the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out to me how Europe’s highest taxing countries have the strongest growth.

Quote:Last year, Mr. Gale and a colleague, Claire Haldeman, published a study on the effects of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts up until the start of the pandemic recession. They looked for supply-side effects — whether the cuts increased investment incentives and other means of stimulating sustained economic growth — and found little evidence of such results. Instead, they found that the cuts did little to promote job growth or investment outside the oil and gas sector, which is highly correlated with the global price of fossil fuels. And they found that the cuts significantly reduced federal tax revenues, contrary to Republicans’ promises that the cuts would pay for themselves by inciting additional economic growth.

Broader research suggests that Ms. Truss’s cuts for top earners are unlikely to drive significant gains in economic growth. In a recent study of decades of tax changes, Owen Zidar, an economist at Princeton, found that cuts for the top 10 percent of earners did little to prompt job gains. The hope that cuts in Britain’s top rate will supercharge the economy, Mr. Zidar said in an interview, “is completely at odds with the empirical record of the United States since 1950.” Mr. Gale, Mr. Zidar and other economists joined the I.M.F. in noting a particular challenge for the British tax cuts: the likelihood that they will be offset by interest rate increases from the Bank of England, as it seeks to bring down price growth.

• Since the existing evidence is negative it's no wonder Truss sacked the Secretary to the Treasury and didn't accompany the budget with a projection of the Office for Budget Responsibility. These are articles of faith not to be scrutinized by facts..