A Failure to Communicate

How do you communicate with someone who lives inside a bubble?

It's long been clear that the Republican party has built a bubble for their base as part of a very successful tactic to secure party loyalty.  By filling the bubble with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the right wing blogosphere, the party has been able to create an alternate reality where Democrats are always wrong, Republicans are always right, Democrats routinely devise nefarious plans to destroy America and Republicans ride in to save the day. The bubble has shielded the base from reality, so Republicans don't have to acknowledge decades of data showing that trickle-down economics increases debt without doing anything to grow the economy or create jobs.

But the stunned looks on the faces of the Fox News team when Ohio was called for Obama, the refusal of Karl Rove to accept what had happened, the fantastical rationalizations coming from the right in the aftermath (Romney wasn't conservative enough!) have lead to a disturbing conclusion.  It appears that, at some point, the Republican leadership crawled into the bubble after their base, sealed it behind them, and the air is becoming increasingly toxic in there. 

If you want to be a competent politician, you can't buy your own spin.  It's routine to downplay bad poll numbers, but in private you're still supposed to take them seriously.  If Nate Silver wasn't playing party politics when he correctly projected the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, then he probably isn't playing party politics now.

In fact, I think some of the critical failures of the Romney campaign stem from the candidate's inability to see beyond the Republican bubble.  At key points in the campaign, Romney picked themes that were staples of the bubble, but known falsehoods outside of it.  Themes like: Obama took a bad economy and "made the problem worse", "you didn't build that", Obama didn't say "Act of Terror" for 14 days and Jeep will be "moving all production to China".

Saying that Obama had made the economy worse was the opening gambit of the Romney campaign.  Inside the bubble, the complete failure of Obama's economic policy is gospel.  Outside the bubble, people know that Obama turned an economy that was losing 800,000 jobs a month to one that has been adding 100,000 - 200,000 jobs a month since 2010, which does not meet the definition of the word "worse".  With so many Americans still suffering, angry and desperate for a faster recovery, Romney's best case for himself was the economy, but he undercut that case by providing a false assessment of what was really happening.

The Republican Convention was Mitt's big chance to reintroduce himself to the American people after the Republican debates.  Unfortunately, Mitt chose "you didn't build that" as the convention's theme.  This was very popular inside the bubble, where people accepted the bizarre notion that the President of the United States would actually believe that entrepreneurs should be denied credit for the businesses they created and that America should abandon the free market.  Outside the bubble, it was clear that the President was talking about infrastructure.  While individuals can build businesses, they can't build the infrastructure necessary to support those businesses, so a healthy economy requires both individual achievement and responsible government.  Basing the convention on a known falsehood was one of the reasons the convention flopped.

In the second debate, Romney had a real chance to score points from the tragedy in Benghazi.  He squandered that chance by basing his attack on the bubble myth that Obama did not use the phrase "act of terror" until 14 days after the  attack.  The myth held that Obama was trying to pretend that he had defeated Al Qaeda entirely, was embarrassed to be proven wrong, and was trying to cover up by pretending terrorists were not involved.  In truth, Obama claims to have severely compromised Al Qaeda's central leadership, greatly reducing their ability to mount another 9/11 scale attack, but he has made it clear the Al Qaeda and its affiliates still exist and terrorism remains our top national security threat.  Also, Obama is on tape the day after the Benghazi attack clearly using the phrase "acts of terror".

Finally, the warped reality of the bubble led Romney to spend the last day of a very close race lying to the people of Ohio about the auto industry.  Outside the bubble, Bloomberg News had reported that Chrysler was planning to resume Jeep sales to China and would eventually produce those Jeeps locally.  Back in the bubble, a blogger with stunningly poor English comprehension skills took this to mean that Jeep would be shipping all US jobs to China, and Romney believed him.  Even after the real Bloomberg story was revealed, the CEO of Chrysler made it clear that Jeep would not be moving any US jobs and was in fact planning to add 1,100 new US jobs, and interviews starting popping up with Ohio voters who made it clear they know a lot more about Jeep than Mitt Romney does and they don't appreciate being lied to, Mitt still couldn't be convinced to climb out of the bubble and accept reality.  In spite of the evidence, he and his running mate Paul Ryan kept repeating the lie to the bitter end.  Thanks to the bubble, Mitt Romney spent the last day of the campaign poisoning the voter pool in America's most critical swing state.

So how do you communicate with someone who lives inside a bubble? 

How do you communicate with someone who has had that bubble hermetically sealed and covered the interior with reflective paint?  How do you convince them to scratch off a patch of that paint and see for themselves what the outside world looks like? 

To help residents of the bubble understand what objective reality actually looks like, I hope the following thought experiment might be helpful:

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush was a Democrat.

Imagine that nothing else had changed.  That everything happened exactly the way it did in real life, except that instead of having a capital "R" after his name, Bush had a capital "D".

Imagine that a Democrat had turned a surplus into the largest debt in history.  Imagine he accomplished this, in part, by simply giving away the surplus, spending a large percentage on bureaucracy in the process, then initiated two wars and an expensive prescription drug program without providing any way to pay for them.  If a Democrat did that, would we be referring to Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility?

Imagine that a Democrat presided over eight years of the weakest economic growth in modern history, followed by the most catastrophic economic collapse since the Great Depression.  Would we describe Democrats as the party that understands business and the economy?

Imagine that the most devastating terrorist attack in US history had occurred on a Democrat's watch.  Imagine that the Democrat responded by starting the two longest wars in US history, and was unable to conclude either war by the end of his presidency, or to find the terrorist most responsible for the attack.  Imagine that one of these wars turned out to be entirely unnecessary and counterproductive, in spite of costing twice as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks and more Iraqi lives than Saddam Hussein.  Would we call Democrats the party that's tough on terror and dependable on defense?

Imagine that a Democrat lost a great American city and over 1,000 American lives due to inaction in the face of a great storm.  Would we describe Democrats as the party that brought competent, business-like management to the White House?

Imagine that a Democrat had inherited an America at the peak of its power, the one undisputed economic and military superpower in the world, and left an America so damaged that many, both at home and abroad, were questioning whether our best days were behind us.  Would we describe Democrats as the party of bold leadership?  As the party we could trust to keep America strong?

If a Democrat had that record, how long would it be before we trusted Democrats again?

Yet Republicans never lost faith.  In 2008, they chose John McCain, who essentially promised to keep the Bush administration going.  In 2010 they voted in a House that promised to double down on Bush's policies, and promptly became the most incompetent and unpopular congress in history.  In 2012, they chose Mitt Romney, who not only pledged to return us to Bush era policies, but filled his campaign with ex-Bush staffers, the exact same people responsible for these disasters in the first place.

Now try the same thought experiment for Barack Obama:

Imagine that a Republican inherited the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.  An economy so bad that many analysts said that avoiding a new depression may be impossible.  And yet the Republican President did exactly that.  He halted the economic collapse, prevented a new depression, turned the recession into a recovery, transformed an economy that was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month into one that for two years added 100 - 200,000 jobs a month so that, by the end of four years, he created more new jobs than his predecessor had in eight and along the way he had saved the US auto industry.  Would we be calling this a failed presidency?  Would we be saying that Republicans had made the economy worse?

If you say that we should take steps to speed up the recovery, most people would agree with you.  If you say that much of Washington is broken and in desperate need of repair, most people would agree with you.  If you want to have productive discussions about the size and role of government, most people would be happy to join you.  But if you say that Obama's policies have failed, that he took a bad economy and made it worse, that we could improve our situation by providing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that our country is on a more dangerous trajectory now than it was four years ago, you are simply wrong.  You are making statements that are utterly and demonstrably false. 

If you are more frightened by the direction our country is heading in 2012 than you were in 2008, there is something fundamentally wrong with your reality testing.

Unfortunately, fundamentally flawed reality testing has been a defining feature of the Republican party for some time now, and in 2012 it cost them dearly.  It's clear that the bubble is running out of air, and Republicans need to poke some holes in that thing if they want to survive.

When Neutrality Becomes Bias

There seems to be a paradox in modern politics.  Every election the technology for fact checking grows faster and easier, and yet it seems as if it also becomes easier for politicians to get away with lying.  My suspicion is that this is because we've lost the mainstream media as the arbiter of truth.

Back in the day, it was the responsibility of the media to hold politicians accountable for their actions.  This required investigative journalism, which was very expensive, but it was an investment that paid off.  Major scoops, like Woodward and Bernstein's work on Watergate, was what differentiated newspapers and drew readers from the competition. 

But two things changed that.

First, political operatives discovered that if they couldn't counter the message of a story, they could still attack the messenger.  Accusations of bias became an effective technique for derailing any story.

Second, the advent of the internet fragmented the media market.  Investigative journalism lost its status as the primary draw to news outlets, while remaining just as expensive.  

Now that it had become both dangerous and unprofitable, mainstream news sources abandoned investigative journalism in favor of parrot journalism.  In the new paradigm, the news would simply repeat what other people said.  Instead of investigating a quote, the media would simply "balance" it with a quote from someone else who disagreed.  Since the media never made a judgment for themselves, they were off the hook for accusations of bias, and they could save the money they would have spent on investigating.

Unfortunately, this new paradigm required the media to base its reporting on a fundamentally false premise: that being unbiased and remaining neutral are equivalent.

The premise holds true for matters of opinion.  When two politicians disagree on values or political philosophy, it is appropriate for the media to demonstrate lack of bias by remaining neutral.

However, in matters of fact, neutrality becomes a form of bias.  When two politicians disagree on a fact, there are only two possible explanations: either one is right and one is wrong, or both are wrong.  Whatever the explanation, to remain neutral the media must portray both politicians as being equivalent.  But if one of them is right and the other is wrong, the media can only accomplish this by pulling  down whoever is right and lifting up whoever is wrong.  In effect, the media is showing bias towards whoever is wrong.

The unintended consequences of playing it safe is the we have created a media that is not biased towards the left or the right, but is instead biased towards falsehood.  In the process, they have made lying a viable political tool.

The Bizarro Sixties

I've come to think of our current era as the Bizarro Sixties.

In the original sixties, the stereotype held that liberals were magical thinkers, while conservatives were common sense pragmatists.  A liberal might be expected to say: "Maybe if we form a circle and hold hands and project our positive energy out into the universe, we can fix the world's problems".  A conservative would be expected to respond: "Well, I'd say that and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee".

In the 21st century, these roles seem to have flipped. 

Republicans now seem to value philosophy over real world experience. 

In the year 2000, Republicans introduced the idea of the semi-sentient free market.  If we just unshackled the market through deregulation, gave massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and stood back out of the way, the system would sort itself out to produce the strongest economy possible.

We then spent 12 painful years proving this idea to be catastrophically false.

With regulations dismantled and the Bush tax cuts  in place, we limped through 8 years of the weakest economy in modern history, followed by the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.  Throughout that time, we amassed conclusive evidence that the Bush tax cuts had done nothing to stimulate the economy, create jobs, or aid in the recovery, they had simply ballooned our debt, while reckless deregulation was a major driver of the economic collapse.

The Republican plan to fix this disaster was unanimous: renew the Bush tax cuts and continue deregulation.

In the 21st century, the bizarro conservatives now say: "Pay no attention the lessons of history!  The purity of our vision must not be muddied by facts!  If we just believe hard enough while  repeating the mistakes of the past, maybe tomorrow an invisible hand will reach down from the sky and make it all work this time."

It has now fallen to liberals to step into the shoes of the common sense pragmatist and respond: "Well, that didn't work.  Let's try something else."

The Republican Faith

In the elections of 2010, Republicans rode a wave of voter dissatisfaction with the economy to sweeping victories by promising to focus our national attention on job creation.  However, once the new class of 2010 picked up the reins of power, they defied expectations.  Instead of focusing on jobs, they focused on woman's health issues.  While efforts to boost the economy ground to a halt, Republicans around the country began introducing unprecedented volumes of legislation aimed at restricting access to abortion and contraception. 

This turn of events was baffling to many of us.  How does promising jobs lead to restricting access to healthcare?  How  did so many Republicans decide to take the same seemingly random turn at the same time?  My hypothesis: this can be explained as an artifact of Republicans restructuring their party as a religion.

The Republican drive to restructure their organization from that of a standard political party to something that more closely resembles a religion started to take shape under Reagan, but solidified under Gingrich's Contract with America.  As with most things, this restructuring came with both good news and bad news.

The good news was that political opponents became blasphemers.  Debates on the merits of policy became battles between good and evil.  This created a base of true believers whose faith could never be shaken by policy failure or broken promises.  In a political party, you can switch if the other side is providing better results.  In a religion, you can't join the devil just because God isn't delivering. 

The bad news was that policy became dogma.  There was no longer any middle ground for policy that has merits but isn't the right solution for the moment.  Policy could only be good or evil.  This meant that Republicans could never add new ideas.  They were limited to the policies already approved, since they had just declared all other ideas to be blasphemous.  So when Republicans want to stir things up, or differentiate themselves in a primary, they either have to turn against an idea that they formerly supported, or take an old idea to a new extreme.  The Contract with America built a house and destroyed all of the extra building material, so the only way Republicans can alter their house is to burn down one of the existing rooms.

This put the Republican class of 2010 in a tight spot.  They had run on economic reform, but the only economic tools left to them were tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation, and there wasn't much left to do with those tools.  So their choice was to sit in the echoing silence of their inaction, or distract the American people with noise of some other kind.  Once again, strict dogma had given them very few choices.  They could champion gun rights, but there are few rights gun owners don't already have.  They could start in on gay marriage again, but that theme was growing tired.  So that left reproductive rights. 

Clearly there are many severe social conservatives in the Republican party who have been itching to go medieval on America for decades, but the question is: why did the entire party pick this moment to let loose?  I think the answer is that Republicans have so limited themselves in terms of policy that this was the only path left without a self-imposed roadblock.  It was a choice between attacking woman's rights, or doing absolutely nothing.  In the end, risking half the vote was preferable to letting the public see that, for Republicans, taking action on the economy is an impossibility.

 

P.S.

This also helps explain the seemingly self-destructive "Incredible Shrinking Tent" tactic of the modern Republican.  If everyone outside the party is evil, then you can never make new friends, you can only turn former friends into enemies (since old enemies get stale after a while and you need to do something to keep the base energized).  So the Republicans have had to keep turning against new segments of the American population:  liberals, gays, atheists, Muslims, Hispanics, immigrants, people who live on coasts, people who care about the environment, Americans with college degrees, poor people, African Americans, women and now people who like sex.  Inexplicably, polls show that this leaves 50% of the population, although you would think the only demographic left to attack would be ultra-wealthy celibate white men. 

Next thing you know, Republicans will be going after people who like to share cute cat photos online.

No Mystery

For many Americans, it seems that the cause of our recent economic meltdown remains a mystery.  Without this knowledge, many now embrace solutions that are, in fact, the exact same policies that caused the crisis in the first place.  Primarily, these involve the removal of essential regulations. 

We have allowed ourselves to believe the fiction that we once had a perfectly functioning free market that was corrupted by regulation and now must be freed again.  In truth, our nation has been plagued by a long series of boom-to-bust economic disasters, with a brief reprieve in the second half of the 20th century following the economic reforms of the Great Depression.  This suggests that economic chaos is the natural state of an unregulated free market and that certain key regulations are required for economic stability.

America's first boom-to-bust cycle resulted in the Panic of 1819.  This was followed by the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857, the Long Depression of 1873 - 1896, the Panic of 1907 and finally the Great Depression of 1929 - 1939.  At this point, the American people were tired of continuous economic chaos and empowered the government to take common sense steps to fix the problem.  It was clear that in the modern world, hard work and prudent investing were no guarantee against dying in poverty, so we began creating the social safety net.  It was also clear that a stable economy requires certain baseline regulations, principally the provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 that have become known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

Glass-Steagall drew a line separating commercial banks, where people keep their money, and investment banks, which gamble on high risk / high reward investments.  It recognized that if banks could gamble with the nation's life savings, they could hold the nation hostage.  If they gambled and lost, they could avoid responsibility by telling the nation: "If I go down, I'm taking you all with me".  The government would then either have to bail them out, or suffer a national catastrophe.  By separating commercial and investment banks, Glass-Steagall required the former to safeguard the life savings of the nation, while allowing the later to ride the free market as hard as they liked, as long as they were willing to pay the consequences.  Think of it as the anti-bailout bill.

Given modern rhetoric, you would expect these regulations to have resulted in the end of the free market, the rise of socialism, the nation's collapse into an era of oppression and decline.  Instead, what followed was the greatest period of wealth and stability in American history.  This was the period in which America became the world's preeminent economic superpower, in which the American Dream became our reality, in which capitalism triumphed over communism to become the world's dominant economic system.

We had finally built a foundation that would give our economy the stability to grow.  The economy would still go up and down, but without the devastating collapses that would set us back to square one.  This golden period lasted until the end of the 20th century, when we allowed ourselves to be lulled into false sense of security, to forget the lessons of the past, and to begin chipping away at the foundation our economy was built upon.  In 1999, the principal provisions of Glass-Steagall were repealed and by the beginning of the 21st century our economy's foundation had been entirely chipped away.

What happened next was exactly what you would expect: the floor dropped out from under us.

Our economy returned to its natural state of boom-to-bust chaos. 

The problem is not that certain people are greedy, or unscrupulous, or engaged in class warfare, or are being unfair.

The problem is that, after a few shining decades of reality-based economics, we started making decisions based on how we would like the world to be, rather than the way the world really is.  Today, the path to recovery is clear.  We need to stop repeating the mistakes of the past and start repeating its successes. 

Yes, but How?

One of the primary weapons in the Republicans' campaign against stimulus spending is World War II.  The current Republican narrative fights the conventional wisdom that Roosevelt's New Deal stimulus program helped end the Great Depression, instead claiming that the New Deal was ineffective and it was WWII that saved us.  As Rush Limbaugh said on the January 21^st 2009 edition of Sean Hannity's Fox News show:  "FDR prolonged the New Deal for seven or eight years, and yet he's given credit for ending the Depression. Didn't happen. World War II ended it. The New Deal didn't work."

The question I always want to ask when presented with this line of reasoning is: "Yes, but how?"  Whether or not you agree about the effectiveness of the New Deal, conventional wisdom states that it was indeed WWII that ended the great depression once and for all.  If we accept this premise, then the question becomes: How did it work?  By what economic mechanism did the conflict of WWII end our nation's greatest economic disaster? 

The answer is that WWII ended the Great Depression by enabling the government to use vast quantities of taxpayer money to put an unemployed nation back to work at temporary jobs.  In other words, it was the largest government stimulus program in history: the New Deal on steroids.

When a nation is hit by a financial disaster on the scale of the Great Depression, it is forced into a self-defeating cycle.  People lose their savings, so they are no longer able to buy products.  The companies that produce those products lose revenue and have to lay off workers, creating even more people who are unable to buy products.  Rising unemployment leads to reduced revenues which leads to even higher unemployment and even lower revenues.  Without something to break the cycle, this just continues until the majority of citizens are unemployed and the majorities of businesses are bankrupt.

WWII presented such a boom to our economy because, after being isolationist since WWI, the US was completely unprepared for war.  We needed to start more or less from scratch producing all of the material required for war, from tanks to rifles to uniforms to rations.  To produce all of this material, the government needed to open up many of the closed factories and put many of the unemployed citizens back to work.  Because the cause was national defense, the government didn't need to worry about objections to using taxpayer money or building deficits, but the economic mechanism for recovery was exactly the same as the New Deal. 

Without government help your local factory is shut down and you're living in a tent city with no way to find work.  When WWII breaks out, the government uses taxpayer money to reopen the factory and put you back to work in it producing tanks.  A few years later, the war is over, there is no longer any need for you or the factory to produce tanks and the tanks you spent the war producing are rusting in a field in Europe.  It would seem that nothing permanent came from the war stimulus and that things should go right back to the way they were, but they didn't.  While the war didn't produce new jobs or businesses, four years of government stimulus had put spending money in people's pockets.  It had given business owners the resources they needed to reopen their shops and customers with the money to shop there.  It had broken the cycle, allowing the economy to begin driving itself without government involvement.

As a war, WWII was a righteous cause.  As an economic mechanism, it was exactly the same as paying people to dig holes and then fill them back up.  On both counts, it was a great success.

If you believe that WWII ended the Great Depression, then you believe in the effectiveness of stimulus spending.  When looking for the way out of our current Great Recession, we have WWII as an example of what  happens when the government steps in with large scale stimulus spending and Japan's Lost Decade as an example of what happens when it doesn't.  Financial debacles of this scale produce the only set of circumstances where trying to balance the budget is fiscally irresponsible.  In our current situation, we will never be able to cut enough to make a dent in the budget.  Realistically, the only way to reduce the deficit is by repairing the economy and the only proven method for repairing the economy is stimulus spending.

The Tea Party vs America

The Tea Party makes good TV.  It has anger and costumes and members at its fringe who redefine the word "fringe".  Unfortunately, all of the sound and fury distracts us from the core values that drive the movement.  When you boil away all of the drama, it seems that Tea Party members believe that they are not receiving their legal representation from the federal government, making them victims of tyranny and entitling them to start a revolution for freedom patterned on our founders' revolution against the British.  Unfortunately, the only way to believe this is if you are painfully misinformed about the Constitution and our nation's history.  The sad truth is that none of what the Tea Party members face qualifies as tyranny and that what the Tea Party is actually protesting is American Democracy.

The American government, as structured by the Constitution, is a representative government.  This means that citizens do not directly vote on legislation.  Instead, every two years we go to the polls to vote for representatives who will then vote on our behalf.  Once we elect a representative, they are free to act as they see fit.  If voters feel that they are not being well served by their representative, they can protest the representative's actions and try to get them to change their policies.  Failing that, citizens next course of action is to wait for the next election and try to vote the offending representative out of office. 

Nowhere in the Constitution are representatives required to follow opinion polls and always vote in a accordance with what's most popular amongst their constituents.  Ironically, Republicans were very clear on this issue when George W. Bush's poll numbers showed that around 70% of Americans disagreed with his policies and felt they were being poorly represented by him.  At the time, they declared that the presidency was not a popularity contest and considered the President brave for ignoring public opinion and sticking to his guns.

Sadly, these days even the Republican mainstream seems to have forgotten the true nature of American democracy.  In their new "Pledge to America", Republicans say that "In a self-governing society, the only bulwark against the power of the state is the consent of the governed, and regarding the policies of the current government, the governed do not consent."  This statement is, in a word, false.   In America, the primary bulwark against the power of the state is the right to vote.  If you voted in a free and fair election, then you are being represented to the fullest extent required by the Constitution.  No matter how strongly you disagree with your representatives, you are not the victim of tyranny and you have no claim to the right of revolution.

Much has been made of Jefferson's comment on revolution and " the blood of patriots".  Unfortunately, no one mentions the most critical part of that statement, which is not what he said but when he said it.  Jefferson wrote this in a letter in 1787, after the revolution but before the new Constitution was ratified and its key amendments written.  In other words, he said it before our great American system of government existed.  America's greatness comes from the system laid down in the Constitution, an elegant system which guarantees both individual freedom and the peaceful transfer of power.  As long as America's politicians hold to that system and the people retain the right to vote, revolution can only be an attack on America herself.

When our founders said "taxation without representation is tyranny", they were saying that "the monarchy that controls my country is taking my money in taxes and providing nothing but brutal repression in return".

When Tea Party members say "taxation without representation is tyranny", they are saying that "my democratically elected government is enacting policies that I disagree with".

Clearly, there is no parity between these two statements.  When you boil away the sound and fury, the Tea Party is a group of people who are angry that we had an election in 2008 and the other guys won.  In other words, the Tea Party is a movement of people who are bitterly angry at American Democracy.

Who's Laffing Now?

As we reach the climax of the 2010 election season, the Republicans have released their new "Pledge to America".  Not surprisingly, the economic portion of the pledge centers on tax cuts designed to stimulate the economy, increase revenues and reduce the deficit.  However, unlike most political pledges based on untested rhetorical ideas, these sorts of tax cuts have actually been the subject of exhaustive testing.  These are the same tax cuts we have seen in action over the combined 16 years of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.  In 2010, the tests are complete and the results are conclusive: tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans do exactly what you would expect them to do - lower tax revenues and raise deficits without stimulating the economy in any way. 

So why do we continue the debate as if the tests hadn't been run and the truth determined?  The answer lies in the myth of the Reagan Administration.

It all began with the Laffer Curve.  In 1974 economist Arthur Laffer attended a Ford Administration strategy meeting also attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and several others.  At the meeting, Laffer argued against Ford's proposed tax increase by presenting what became known as the "Laffer Curve" (although the concept has been around for centuries - Laffer himself attributes it to the 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldu):

Legend has it that this curve was first presented the modern Republican party on a cocktail napkin, which Laffer used as scratch paper.  The curve has two data points:  1) if the tax rate is zero, you get zero tax revenue, 2) if the tax rate is 100 you also get zero tax revenue, since working would provide no more income than not working.  A curve is drawn between these two points, creating the theoretical concept that raising taxes raises revenue up to a point, after which it actually lowers revenue by discouraging productivity.  This concept remained theoretical and untested until the Reagan Administration.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top tax rate was 70%, which Reagan cut to 35%, and tax revenue did, in fact, go up - bringing us to the myth. 

Under the Carter Administration taxes were high, but also full of loopholes.  Almost nobody in the 70% bracket actually paid that much, since they could afford accountants who could find tax shelters to hide their money from the government.  In fact, most of the wealthy in the 70's were so good at finding loopholes that they didn't pay any taxes at all.  When Reagan took over he lowered taxes, but he also closed the loopholes, so on paper it looked like he lowered taxes on the wealthy form 70% to 35%, but in reality he raised taxes on the wealthy from 0% to 35%.

The myth is that Reagan raised revenues by lowering taxes.

The truth is that Reagan raised revenues by raising taxes.

This pattern was confirmed in the George W. Bush Administration.  Without the distractions of absurd 70% tax rates and complicated loopholes, we were left with the simple math that, when the top tax rates are set at a reasonable level (around 40% in this case), lowering taxes does exactly what you would expect it to do: it lowers revenues and increases deficits.  Ironically, this is exactly what the Laffer Curve predicts.  The curve is traditionally drawn with the tip of the bell at 50%, which means that at any tax rate under 50%, lowering taxes should lower revenues.

Unfortunately, tax cuts have gone on to become the cornerstone of Republican economic policy.  The idea is that tax cuts, especially those to the wealthy, cause the wealthy to spend more personally and to invest more in business, which creates jobs and stimulates the economy, which increases tax revenue and lowers the deficit.  It would be lovely to live in a world where this idea could work, but unfortunately we live in this one.  In this world we have tested this idea and, once again, proved it false. 

In 2001 and again in 2003, George W. Bush passed a series of tax cuts, which lowered the top rate to 35%.  Over the next seven years, we saw deficits skyrocket and the economy flounder.  Although the weak economic  numbers were artificially inflated by the sub-prime mortgage bubble, that bubble burst in 2008, sending us spiraling toward the next great depression.  The tax cuts remained in place though all of this and continued during the first two years of the Obama Administration, where they have shown no sign of stimulating the economy or aiding in the recovery while they continue to add to our debt.

Despite this, these tax cuts remain the cornerstone of the Republican's new Pledge to America.  They claim that these same tax cuts, which have done nothing but grow the debt over the last 7-9 years, will suddenly start producing results if they are renewed.

Instead of just taking the politicians' words for it this time, why don't we look at the tests, review the results, and decide for ourselves?