Oh? In that case, why -- without a rise in taxes this year -- did tax collections increase? On account of more economic activity, on which business and private people paid more taxes. It appears that Americans are more inspired to work for themselves than for the Internal Revenue Service.
Washington doesn't easily swallow that morsel of reality. But an even larger hunk of reality sticks fast in Washington craws: namely, that tax cuts for "the rich" -- who pay the most taxes to begin with -- in fact help everyone. It's the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats stuff.
Democrats in particular love to play politics with this crucial insight of the supply-side tax reformers who successfully, in the Reagan years, urged across-the-board tax cuts, thereby juicing up a dry and flat economy. The whole political notion is to rouse the "poor" against the "rich." The latter have fewer votes than the former, you see.
So it's always been, in truth. Human nature seems to set up human society for this kind of class-based face-off. The pity, in the United States of the 21st century, is that so many know better yet acknowledge it with reluctance.
Where does the Washington establishment -- Republican as well as Democratic -- suppose our present prosperity came from if not from the tax cutting and deregulating of the 1980s? Give people incentives to work harder and they'll work harder.
We proved it in the'80s. What stands in the way of proving it again? The deficit, yes, but more than that, Republican balkiness and fearfulness on the tax-cut issue. If influential Republicans lean more toward raising taxes than cutting them, what makes them look different from Democrats? And if the answer is "nothing," aren't the voters entitled to another question: Who needs Republicans anyway?