The Press Needs to Fight Back on Republican Tax Lunacy
Mother Jones
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Steve Benen on the Rubio-Lee tax plan:
At first blush, it’s tempting to see Marco Rubio’s economic plan as a dog-bites-man story: Republican presidential campaign proposes massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, even while saying the opposite.
Benen goes on to manfully make the case that Rubio’s tax crankery actually does deserve extra special attention, but I’m not sure he does the job. Sure, Rubio’s deficit would be humongous, but so would everyone else’s. And Rubio has a helluva mountain to climb to take the top spot in the tax craziness derby. Let’s roll the tape:
The “sensible” candidate says his tax plan will boost growth to 4 percent a year. His advisors have basically admitted that this number was pulled out of thin air.
A second candidate, not to be outdone on the absurd growth front, says his plan will cause the economy to take off like a rocket, producing growth as high as 6 percent. How will he manage this? “I just will.”
Another candidate suggests we adopt a tax plan based on the Biblical practice of tithing.
Yet another candidate, apparently thinking that tithing isn’t quite crazy enough, proposes an even lower flat tax.
This is all fantasyland stuff. So why doesn’t the media hammer them more on it? Why do debate moderators let them get away with such lunacy? Good question. John Harwood tried the only honest approach in the last debate, suggesting that Donald Trump was running a “comic book” campaign—and it was Harwood who got hammered. Harwood gamely tried a second time with Trump, telling him that “you have as chance of cutting taxes that much without increasing the deficit as you would of flying away from that podium by flapping your arms.” Trump brushed him off. Harwood tried yet again with Rubio, this time citing numbers from the Tax Foundation, and Rubio brushed him off. That’s a couple of tries at mockery and one try at arithmetic, and they both had the same effect.
There’s not much left to do. If candidates want to say that brass is gold, and people choose to believe them despite piles of evidence to the contrary, you’re stuck. Eventually you feel like you have to move on to something else.
But maybe you don’t. Maybe you just keep asking, over and over. Maybe you ask every candidate the same question. Republicans will scream about how the liberal media hates them, and then they’ll trot out their pet economists to insist that tax cuts really do hypercharge the economy. The moderators will take a lot of heat over this. But it might actually turn supply-side nuttiness into a real topic that gets its 15 minutes of fame. That’s better than nothing.
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