Holiday reading: Tax history as fashioned by wingnuts.

Turns out that there was time for relaxation after the painting was through. An article by David Sirota (recommended by Randy Smith) was good enough ...

The Tax History Conservatives Want Us to Forget

... but within the comments section there was a link to something even better:

Feast of the Wingnuts: How economic crackpots devoured American politics, by Jonathan Chait, The New Republic (September 10, 2007).

Follow the link for the whole piece, which is too lengthy to reprint in its entirety.

Like most crank doctrines, supplyside economics has at its core a central insight that does have a ring of plausibility. The government can't simply raise tax rates as high as it wants without some adverse consequences. And there have been periods in American history when, nearly any contemporary economist would agree, top tax rates were too high, such as the several decades after World War II. And there are justifiable conservative arguments to be made on behalf of reducing tax rates and government spending. But what sets the supply-siders apart from sensible economists is their sheer monomania. You could plausibly argue that, say, Reagan's tax cuts contributed around the margins to the economic growth of the 1980s. But the supply-siders believe that, if it were not for Reagan's tax cuts, the economic malaise of the late '70s would have continued indefinitely. They believe that economic history is a function of tax rates--they insisted that Bill Clinton's upper-bracket tax hike must cause a recession (whoops), and they believe that the present economy is a boom not merely enhanced but brought about by the Bush tax cuts.