I’ve come to a cross roads, and I believe many of you are with me. I no longer have faith that members of the Grand Old Party can represent me as a classical liberal or more specifically as a Conservative-Libertarian, and neither do I believe the majority of the members of the party share true forms of those ideologies.

This feeling began developing after the 2010 election when several friends and colleagues of mine and I developed ConservativeCongress.com to assess every single candidate self-proclaimed to be running as a conservative in the entire country. Thousands of unpaid and thankless hours were put into the project by myself and my friends. I myself put in roughly 2,000 to 3,000 hours alone. Then I watched as various state Tea Party groups and supposedly conservative minding groups signed off on the status quo. I became sick as state after state sent D.C. main stays and beltway insiders back to flap their gums about conservative principles while we all watched continuous compromise and a lack of any leadership with the House at their disposal.

The final blow personally for me was when I watched a man take my home district who had not lived in his home state in 18 years and also did not even own property in the state in which he was running for office. I’ve had the great privilege in my lifetime to travel extensively and live in various areas of our great nation. I remember very clearly living abroad in Australia some seven years ago and then upon returning spending the next four years moving around for graduate school and work. When I made it back home I hardly recognized the place in which I grew up. Everything had changed.

How in the world can I expect a man whom has not lived in my state in 20 years to understand the mindset, the true needs, and the conditions of the place he calls “home” and effectively execute the needs of those people with his representation in Congress? Furthermore, how can I trust party members that would attend Tea Party rallies and wax poetic about conservative ideals and then vote for this type of candidate? Consequently this gentleman has done nothing of any interest in his first term. Shock and awe!

This type of thing happens all of the time in D.C. and it is baffling. It is akin to Microsoft hiring as their CEO an 18 year veteran of Apple, whom had zero experience at Microsoft and then telling him he could run the company from Apple.

It was at this point that, while I was and am still heavily vested in the policy side of the tech/telecomm sector, my interest in politics and having any faith in the Republican Party died a very sad death. A death that has not seen any signs of life with the current GOP nominees for president.

It’s unsettling that Republicans who claim to be conservatives or “Tea Party’ers,” can without a hesitation hand over their support to an individual who seems to have learned the definition of “conservative” from Dictionary.com. Republicans have spent 4 years lining up outside to protest the healthcare bill and now they are lining up inside to throw their nomination at the man who is responsible for the model for Obamacare.

In fact, most of the entire line up of candidates, whether they realized it or not, were moderates in some fashion. Being that there is no political ideology in political theory for the terminology “moderate” I can only determine that the modern Republican Party is represented by a form of Neo-Con.

These were the individuals the Tea Party was going to take the GOP back from. But if you go by the evidence of the actions of the individuals reelected and those voted into office only one of two things can be determined, and my appologies in advance for my bluntness, but:

1) Either the majority of the Republican Party is now represented by fiscal moderates and  interventionists or some type of Neo-Con; or,
2) The party is represented by a majority of idiots who take to the streets and protest for one thing, but can’t rationalize how to apply that ideology to the appropriate candidate in the voting booth.

One has to realize that many of the founders of American NeoConservatism were Democrats. The whole movement, which arguably could be traced back some 60 years, but at a minimum to the 1980’s has moved the entire American political spectrum left. NeoCons are what Democrats were 33 years ago. The Democratic Party has transitioned into a party of progressive socialist principles and instead of  conservatives in the GOP holding their ground they have additionally taken a step to the left to replace the spot where the Democrats once stood while those of us promoting liberty seem to be doing so with a shrinking audience.

Peggy Noonan warned of this ratchet affect in 2010,

Imagine that over at the 36-inch end [of a yard stick] you’ve got pure liberal thinking—more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you’ve got conservative thinking—a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.

But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they’re dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It’s always grown! It’s as if something inexorable in our political reality—with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy—has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: “Hey, it coulda been 29!”

But Noonan anticipated  that the Tea Party would correct the course of the party, not just show up to rallies and then vote like they had always done when it was time to go to the polls.

The truth is that once a citizen gets in on the “gimme” game, they gotcha and then one is a slave to the dictator who can provide for you.

Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force. -The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 21, 1

The new conservatism is RINO.

No longer can you point out a RINO because the whole party is RINO and the majority of the GOP constituency is RINO.

To be fair the populous of the GOP are social cons. The support shared generally by all are now the issues of pro-life, traditional marriage, and fascist police state protectionism from “terrorism”.

This often makes little sense as we have done nothing to protect our own borders, but we love to go to the other side of the world and kill people. I’m personally guilty of this. And I’m glad I’ve grown a foul distaste for it. For whatever reason Republicans love getting boots on the ground and going to war, and often in ways that make little sense. We allow Iran and North Korea to build nuclear programs in broad daylight but we spill blood and treasure to liberate a country we had vague evidence of. for people who don’t appreciate our sacrifice.

Has anyone stopped to think that it is impossible to keep paying millions for bombs and hundreds of billions on wars and simultaneously lower taxes and get out of debt? It’s not just social programs that are destroying our nation. Bueller? Bueller?

The completion of the takeover of the Democrat Party by progressives was shown to have come to completion 4 years ago and today I think it’s clear that the Neo-Cons and moderate conservatives now control the vast majority of the GOP. That includes all the Tea Party’ers that walked out their doors November of 2010 and voted establishment beltway insiders back into office. Shame on you.

The GOP cries for another Reagan but it will never find him. Because the party of Reagan and Goldwater is dead. The tides have shifted. The Democrats will represent modern socialism. The GOP will represent wafflers, flip floppers, moderates, former Democrats, fiscal liberals that claim to be fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.

I have no agenda here. But those of us who desire liberty will either laugh and cry as it all falls apart around us or find a way to establish a third party that actually backs our talk of classical liberalism up with our support and votes. I’ve been a member of the GOP for my entire life, but as Zell Miller said about his beloved Democratic Party in 2004, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me.

Originally published at nickrbrown.com.

Those two charts showed that the current recovery was very weak compared to the boom of the early 1980s.

But perhaps that was an unfair comparison. Maybe the Reagan recovery started strong and then hit a wall. Or maybe the Obama recovery was the economic equivalent of a late bloomer.

So let’s look at the same charts, but add an extra year of data. Does it make a difference?

Meh…not so much.

Let’s start with the GDP data. The comparison is striking. Under Reagan’s policies, the economy skyrocketed.  Heck, the chart prepared by the Minneapolis Fed doesn’t even go high enough to show how well the economy performed during the 1980s.

Under Obama’s policies, by contrast, we’ve just barely gotten back to where we were when the recession began. Unlike past recessions, we haven’t enjoyed a strong bounce. And this means we haven’t recovered the output that was lost during the downturn.

This is a damning indictment of Obamanomics

Indeed, I made this point several months ago when analyzing some work by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas. And it’s been highlighted more recently by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute and the news pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, the jobs chart is probably even more discouraging. As you can see, employment is still far below where it started.

This is in stark contrast to the jobs boom during the Reagan years.

So what does this mean? How do we measure the human cost of the foregone growth and jobs that haven’t been created?

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, former Senator Phil Gramm and budgetary expert Mike Solon compare the current recovery to the post-war average as well as to what happened under Reagan.

If in this “recovery” our economy had grown and generated jobs at the average rate achieved following the 10 previous postwar recessions, GDP per person would be $4,528 higher and 13.7 million more Americans would be working today. …President Ronald Reagan’s policies ignited a recovery so powerful that if it were being repeated today, real per capita GDP would be $5,694 higher than it is now—an extra $22,776 for a family of four. Some 16.9 million more Americans would have jobs.

By the way, the Gramm-Solon column also addresses the argument that this recovery is anemic because the downturn was caused by a financial crisis. That’s certainly a reasonable argument, but they point out that Reagan had to deal with the damage caused by high inflation, which certainly wreaked havoc with parts of the financial system. They also compare today’s weak recovery to the boom that followed the financial crisis of 1907.

But I want to make a different point. As I’ve written before, Obama is not responsible for the current downturn. Yes, he was a Senator and he was part of the bipartisan consensus for easy money, Fannie/Freddie subsidies, bailout-fueled moral hazard, and a playing field tilted in favor of debt, but his share of the blame wouldn’t even merit an asterisk.

My problem with Obama is that he hasn’t fixed any of the problems. Instead, he has kept in place all of the bad policies – and in some cases made them worse. Indeed, I challenge anyone to identify a meaningful difference between the economic policy of Obama and the economic policy of Bush.

• Bush increased government spending. Obama has been increasing government spending.
• Bush adopted Keynesian “stimulus” policies. Obama adopted Keynesian “stimulus” policies.
• Bush bailed out politically connected companies. Obama has been bailing out politically connected companies.
• Bush supported the Fed’s easy-money policy. Obama has been supporting the Fed’s easy-money policy.
• Bush created a new healthcare entitlement. Obama created a new healthcare entitlement.
• Bush imposed costly new regulations on the financial sector. Obama imposed costly new regulations on the financial sector.

I could continue, but you probably get the  point. On economic issues, the only real difference is that Bush cut taxes and Obama is in favor of higher taxes. Though even that difference is somewhat overblown since Obama’s tax policies – up to this point – haven’t had a big impact on the overall tax burden (though that could change if his plans for higher tax rates ever go into effect).

This is why I always tell people not to pay attention to party labels. Bigger government doesn’t work, regardless of whether a politician is a Republican or Democrat. The problem isn’t Obamanomics, it’s Bushobamanomics. But since that’s a bit awkward, let’s just call it statism.

The private memo, dated July 1, 1980, was written by Mr. Gingrich on his official House of Representatives stationery and was sent to then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, Bill Casey, who would later become President Reagan’s CIA Director.

In the memo, Mr. Gingrich urges Governor Reagan’s campaign to reconsider its decision not to speak to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Convention.

“This is a great opportunity to prove that a conservative Republican can speak to the hearts and pocketbooks of Black Americans,” Gingrich urged in the memo.

The memorandum goes on to explain that a decision not to speak at the NAACP convention would insult African American voters and be a “tragedy” for the nation:

Many middle class Black Americans who would vote for Reagan will be insulted by his non-attendance.  I urge you to schedule the speech and talk about Kemp’s Inner City Jobs Bill, which Kilpatrick and George Will have both endorsed as acceptably conservative.

Failure to attend the NAACP convention will be a tragedy for Gov. Reagan and the country.  Symbolic events are vital.  Thank you for considering this.

The 1980 Gingrich memorandum aligns with comments the former Speaker has made more recently.

At a January 5, 2012 event in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said that if he were invited to speak to the NAACP he would accept:

And so, I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention to talk about why the African American community should demand pay checks and not be satisfied with food stamps. And I’ll go to them and I’ll explain a brand new social security opportunity for young people, which would be particularly good for African American males, because they’re the group that gets the smallest return on social security because they have the shortest life span. And under social security today, you don’t build up an estate, but if you’re allowed to build up an estate, if your tax money went into your savings and it was your money, if something happened to you, your family got you restate, the difference in transfer of wealth to the black community would be amazing.

Those and subsequent comments have sparked controversy among liberal critics who have taken issue with Mr. Gingrich’s contention that President Barack Obama has been America’s greatest “Food Stamp President,” a reference to Mr. Obama’s unprecedented expansion of the food stamp program (officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

Mr. Gingrich’s 1980 plea that the Reagan campaign should reach out to the NAACP and make inroads with black voters was just the first of many he has made to GOP candidates over many years.

As ABC News has reported, in his book Real Change, Mr. Gingrich criticized President George W. Bush’s “failure to address the NAACP,” which according to Gingrich, sent a “clear signal to the African American community that Republicans did not see them as worthy of engagement in dialogue.”

Also, in 2008, Mr. Gingrich criticized those 2008 Republican presidential candidates who declined to participate in a black voter forum hosted by Tavis Smiley.

Still, while it’s unlikely that Mr. Gingrich’s 1980 private memorandum urging the Reagan campaign to speak at the NAACP convention will change the minds of those determined to play the race card against him, the document reveals that Mr. Gingrich’s desire to restore the historic relationship between the Republican Party and black voters extends over three decades.

So I was interested to see he authored an attack on the flat tax – and I was happy after I read his column. Why? Well, because his arguments are rather weak. So anemic that it makes me think there’s actually a chance to get rid of America’s corrupt internal revenue code.

There are two glaring flaws in his argument. First, he demonstrates a complete lack of familiarity with the flat tax and seemingly assumes that tax reform simply means imposing one rate on the current system.

Here’s some of what he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column.

Many useful steps could be taken to simplify the personal income tax. But, contrary to much misleading rhetoric, flattening the rate structure isn’t one of them. The truth is that 100% of the complexity inheres in the definition of taxable income, which takes up millions of words in the tax laws. None inheres in the progressive rate structure. If you don’t believe that, consider the fact that the corporate income tax is virtually flat once a corporation passes a paltry $75,000 in taxable income. Is it simple? Back to the personal tax. Figuring out your taxable income can be quite an effort. But once that is done, most taxpayers just look up their tax bill on an IRS-provided table. Those with incomes above $100,000 must perform a simple calculation that involves multiplying two numbers together and adding a third. A flat tax with an exemption would require precisely the same sort of calculation. The net reduction in complexity? Zero.

I can understand how an average person might think the flat tax is nothing more than applying a single tax rate to the current system, but any public finance economist must know that the plan devised by Professors Hall and Rabushka completely rips up the current tax system and implements a new system based on one tax rate with no double taxation and no loopholes.

Heck, the Hall/Rabushka book is online and free of charge. But Blinder obviously could not be bothered to understand the proposal before launching his attack.

What about his second mistake? This one’s a doozy. He actually assumes that taxable income is fixed, which is a remarkable error for anyone who supposedly understands economics.

…flattening the rate structure won’t make the tax code any simpler. It would, however, make the tax system far less progressive. Do the math. …Someone with $20 million in taxable income pays nearly $7 million in taxes under the current rate structure, with its 35% top rate. Replace that with a 23% flat tax, and the bill drops to just under $4.6 million.

In other words, he assumes that people won’t change their behavior even though incentives to engage in productive behavior are significantly altered.

In a previous post, I showed how rich people dramatically increased the amount of income they were willing to earn and report after Reagan lowered the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

To Blinder, this real-world evidence doesn’t matter – even though the rich paid much more tax to the IRS after Reagan slashed tax rates.

For more information, here’s my flat tax video.

And here’s the video on the global flat tax revolution. Interestingly, there are now about five more flat tax jurisdictions since this video was made – though Iceland abandoned its flat tax, so there are some steps in the wrong direction.

Makes you wonder. If the flat tax is such a bad idea, why are so many nations doing so well using this simple and fair approach?

But be careful, as this cartoon demonstrates, simplicity can mean bad things if the wrong people are in charge.

This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. If you double tax rates, for instance, you won’t double tax revenue.

But it also means teaching folks on the right that it is wildly wrong to claim that “all tax cuts pay for themselves” or that “tax increases always mean less revenue.” Those results occur in rare circumstances, but the real lesson of the Laffer Curve is that some types of tax policy changes will result in changes to taxable income, and those shifts in taxable income will partially offset the impact of changes in tax rates.

However, even though both sides may need some education, it seems that the folks on the left are harder to teach – probably because the Laffer Curve is more of a threat to their core beliefs.

If you explain to a conservative politician that a goofy tax cut (such as a new loophole to help housing) won’t boost the economy and that the static revenue estimate from the bureaucrats at the Joint Committee on Taxation is probably right, they usually understand.

But liberal politicians get very agitated if you tell them that higher marginal tax rates on investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners probably won’t generate much tax revenue because of incentives (and ability) to reduce taxable income.

To be fair, though, some folks on the left are open to real-world evidence. And this IRS data from the 1980s is particularly effective at helping them understand the high cost of class-warfare taxation (click to enlarge).

There’s lots of data here, but pay close attention to the columns on the right and see how much income tax was collected from the rich in 1980, when the top tax rate was 70 percent, and how much was collected from the rich in 1988, when the top tax rate was 28 percent.

The key takeaway is that the IRS collected fives times as much income tax from the rich when the tax rate was far lower. This isn’t just an example of the Laffer Curve. It’s the Laffer Curve on steroids and it’s one of those rare examples of a tax cut paying for itself.

Folks on the right, however, should be careful about over-interpreting this data. There were lots of factors that presumably helped generate these results, including inflation, population growth, and some of Reagan’s other policies. So we don’t know whether the lower tax rates on the rich caused revenues to double, triple, or quadruple. Ask five economists and you’ll get nine answers.

But we do know that the rich paid much more when the tax rate was much lower.

This is an important lesson because Obama wants to run this experiment in reverse. He hasn’t proposed to push the top tax rate up to 70 percent, thank goodness, but the combined effect of his class-warfare policies would mean a substantial increase in marginal tax rates.

We don’t know the revenue-maximizing point of the Laffer Curve, but Obama seems determined to push tax rates so high that the government collects less revenue. Not that we should be surprised. During the 2008 campaign, he actually said he would like higher tax rates even if the government collected less revenue.

That’s class warfare on steroids, and it definitely belong on the list of the worst things Obama has ever said.

But I don’t care about the revenue-maximizing point of the Laffer Curve. Policy makers should set tax rates so we’re at the growth-maximizing level instead.

To broaden the understanding of the Laffer Curve, share these three videos with your friends and colleagues.

This first video explains the theory of the Laffer Curve.

This second video reviews some of the real-world evidence.

And this video exposes the biased an inaccurate “static scoring” of the Joint Committee on Taxation.

And once we educate everybody about the Laffer Curve, we can then concentrate on teaching them about the equivalent relationship on the spending side of the fiscal ledger, the Rahn Curve.

Keep in mind that the battle between those who create wealth and those that want to redistribute it, mainly politicians, is as old as civilization itself.  We read of tax battles and even reform in every age, like Urukagina’s tax reductions in Babylonia/Sumer in 2350 BC.  Equally venerable are the constant set of demagogic lies by those against tax cuts and simplification.  It is important to note that politicians like complicated tax codes and high tax rates because they control those rates and dispense the loopholes and regulations that complicate the tax code.  Tax simplification means they lose power.  As a result, resistance to tax reform is more often the rule than reform. As for the lies, they abound, so let’s consider just a few:

Lie # 1: Tax cuts cause deficits/Tax hikes balance the budget.  The Media and the Left often say that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts led to deficits while Clinton’s tax hikes led to a balanced budget. In truth, according to the IRS, federal tax revenues rose dramatically after the overall Reagan tax cuts/reforms (98%) and the Bush tax cuts (a record $700+ billion). This is just as they did after the Harding/Coolidge cuts (61% revenue increase) and after the Kennedy/Johnson cuts (62% revenue increase).  Those are the four major income tax reductions we have had since the inception of the income tax in 1913 and every time revenues rose after they were in place – every time.

So did the tax rate cut cause a deficit? The lie, of course, is to blame the revenue gathering mechanism (tax code/rate cut) instead of the revenue spending mechanism, i.e. Congress/Presidents.  The spenders kept spending – often at an accelerated rate when they saw the new revenues.  Thus, the fault for continuing deficits lies not with tax rate cuts, which produced higher revenues, but with politicians who spent too much.

Wasn’t there a surplus after the Clinton tax increase? Indeed there was – but only temporarily. First, it must be said that the economy had recovered from the short, Bush 41 tax-increase-induced recession by the end of his Presidency. It then resumed the Reagan recovery that was based on the dramatic reduction in tax rates a decade earlier.

Clinton then raised taxes on the recovering economy, and by the end of his 2nd term, we had the highest tax burden in American history considering federal, state and local taxes combined. To no surprise, we slipped back into a recession by the end of Clinton’s Presidency because of that record tax burden. As a result of the recession, federal expenditures went up (as welfare-related payments rose automatically) and tax revenues faltered along with the economy. The deficit reappeared, fulfilling John Maynard Keynes warning that “high tax rates defeat their own object” — to collect revenue. Thus, the Clinton tax hike temporarily gathered more revenue and, when combined with spending slowed by the Republican Congress, a surplus emerged. But over time, the Clinton tax hike weighed down the economy and reproduced deficits just like the Bush 41 tax increases that also weakened the economy and wound up doubling the deficit during his term.  To give Clinton credit for the surplus, but not the later deficit, is to credit a pitcher with 6 good innings of pitching and fail to report when he lost the game in 7th inning.

Lie #2: Tax revenues would have risen even without a tax cut.  This lie posits that tax rate cuts cost the government money because the revenues would have increased without the cuts as part of a natural business cycle uptick.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  First, as the current economy proves, recoveries are not automatic nor do they necessarily significantly increase employment and/or revenues.

Second, prior to the Reagan tax cuts, the 12 years of combined Nixon/Ford/Carter bad policies resulted in stagflation and tax revenues dropping at a rate of 2.8% per year.  By the end of Carter’s term, the economy was dreadful and showed no appreciable signs of a turnaround. Reagan then dramatically cut tax rates and reduced regulations.  The lie is to assert that the Reagan tax rate cuts had no influence on the economic turnaround that resulted in more employment, more business transactions and therefore more tax revenues.  In truth, without the Reagan tax cuts, especially given the Federal Reserve’s inflation fighting tactics at the time, the economy would not have magically turned around and produced 92 straight months of growth, let alone led the revenue growth. Claiming otherwise is just silly.

Want more proof? Consider the tax rate cuts that produced the Roaring 20’s.  By 1917, just over three years after the income tax code was instituted with a top rate of 7%, Democrat Woodrow Wilson raised the top rate to 77%!  Not surprisingly, we were in a deep recession by 1918.  During the 1920’s, however, the economy turned around and after the tax rate reduction to a top rate of 25%, revenues jumped 61%. So, did the Roaring 20’s just happen to occur or did the tax cuts cause them? The tax rate cuts reversed a dynamic of capital being placed in tax-free government bonds and encouraged capitalists to put their money at risk.  As a result, people were employed, more business transactions occurred and – of course – tax revenues rose.  That changing dynamic would not have magically occurred without the tax reductions.

In sum, tax rate reductions produce more revenue over time because they provide incentives, which result in more business transactions, more income and more sales tax.  It worked in 2350 BC and it will work again once Obama is defeated.  On the other hand, tax hikes produce less revenue over time, because they reduce incentives and weigh down economies.

Lie #3:  Tax cuts  don’t lead to economic growth.  The four major tax cuts (Harding/Coolidge, Kennedy/Johnson, Reagan, and Bush 43) all were followed by economic growth.  The Harding/Coolidge cuts were followed by The Roaring 20’s, the Kennedy/Johnson cuts were followed by three years of growth averaging over 6%, and the Reagan cuts were followed by 92 straight months of economic growth. The Bush tax cuts were followed by 52 straight months of job growth.  Was that all just a mere coincidence?  Given that tax reductions were the only major policy changes shared by those times, the answer is no. Tax rate cuts do lead to economic growth.  Not only that, according to IRS figures, after each of those major tax cuts, the top earners paid a greater percentage of income taxes not less.

Lie #4: The rich don’t pay their fair share.  This is the rallying cry of those who want to raise tax rates.  According to the IRS, however, the top 1% pays nearly 37% of all income taxes.   The bottom 50% pays just over 2% of all income taxes.  For those that claim that is not a fair share, I submit to you that no percentage would be fair.  By using the “fair” card, they are seeking a rhetorical advantage and that will continue to be effective unless these lies are rebutted.

Lie #5:  The Bush tax cuts led to a bad economy in 2008.  It is true that there was a bad economy in 2008, something that occurred 5 years after the Bush tax cut.  So does that mean that those tax cuts caused the bad economy?  Certainly not. The main cause related to government distortion of the housing market combined with bad business practices and mistakes by the Federal Reserve.  There is no plausible economic theory as to how lowering tax rates across the board by a few percentages points (and removing millions from the tax rolls) led to the Wall Street/housing problems 5 years later.  In other words, it’s just a lie.

Lie #6:  The current American tax burden is lower.  That statement is partially wrong and used to demand higher taxes on the rich.  It is true that the federal tax burden has dropped to an abnormally low 14%. It generally is closer to 18%.  The biggest cause for that drop, however, is the prolonged and deep recession.  When a nation has considerably less income for such a prolonged period, tax burdens tend to drop because they are paying fewer taxes then when they had higher income.  Lower incomes leading to lower tax burdens is hardly something to crow about.  Beyond that, the current 14% refers to federal taxes and that number fails to take into account the massive growth in non-federal income taxes such state and local taxes.  Those non-federal taxes have replaced the federal burden.  So, the next time you hear that the top federal income tax rate is lower than in 1950 (true) – tell that person we didn’t have gas taxes, cell phone taxes, cable taxes, cigarette taxes in 1950.  When they say the tax burden is lower than before, tell them it came at the expense of a lower standard of living and that the way to raise tax revenues is to create a vibrant economy.

One last tidbit for your bushel of truths:

The last 8 Presidential winners were the perceived tax-cutting candidate.

1. Reagan over Carter,

2. Reagan over Mondale – who threatened to raise taxes,

3. Bush 41 (read my lips) over Dukakis,

4. Clinton (middle class tax cut) over Bush (who broke his pledge),

5. Clinton (promised to do it again even though he raised taxes) over Dole (who refused to take the No New Tax Pledge and made a career of brokering tax deals as the Republican Senate leader – and whose reputation overrode his tax plan which came too late in the game),

6. Bush 43 over Al Gore (who called tax cuts a risky scheme),

7. Bush 43 (who cut taxes) over Kerry,

8. Obama (promised to cut taxes for 95% of Americans) versus McCain who didn’t believe in the Bush tax cuts.

Knowing all of that, will the 2012 Republican nominee support tax cuts against the tax-raising Obama?  It seems likely if this discussion of tax code simplification continues.  To get it enacted, however, that nominee has to be able to make the case for tax cuts and expose the lies.  Not just in passing, but with all the passion of a true reformer.

I’ve already explained that Bush was a statist rather than a conservative, and you can find additional commentary from me here, here, here, and here.

Simply stated, any President who doubles the burden of federal spending in just eight years is disqualified from being a conservative – unless the term is stripped of any meaning and conservatives no longer care about limited government and constitutional constraints on Washington.

But if you don’t want to read the blog posts I linked above, this chart should make clear that Bush was a big spender, not only when compared to Reagan, but also compared to Clinton. Moreover, we’re only looking at overall domestic spending, so this doesn’t include Iraq, Afghanistan, and other defense expenditures. And these are inflation-adjusted dollars, so we’re comparing apples to apples.

But let’s also examine the burden of domestic spending as a share of GDP. As you can see, there actually was progress during the Clinton years, and significant progress during the Reagan years. But all that was completely wiped out during the Bush presidency.

These numbers should not be a surprise. During Bush’s tenure, we got the no-bureaucrat-left-behind education bill, two corrupt farm bills, a new prescription drug entitlement, two pork-filled transportation bills, an auto company bailout, and a TARP bailout for banks.

This was a time of feasting for special interest groups and lobbyists, to put it mildly.

If that’s conservative, then Ronald Reagan was a liberal.