I mean, this is econ101 level shit. It literally makes no sense at all given the realities of business and economics.
Tax cuts do have an economic multiplier effect, but it's a very small one and they hit diminishing returns very quickly. Stimulus spending on the other hand has a much higher economic multiplier and takes longer to hit those diminishing returns.
In short, GOP economic policy for the past 30-ish has been based in thinking that would cause you to flunk the most basic of economics tests.
That's not necessarily true -- the problem is deeper than "refusing to abide by econ 101."
There are times where the econ 101 thing to do is the wrong thing to do, and there were paradigm shifts across every school of economics consistently through the entire 20th century.
There are times where tax breaks work. There are times when they won't work.
There's times when stimulus would work, and times when stimulus would cause a negative response. There are a lot of variables to consider before you make any one choice, so the rule of thumb is this;
"If your solution is one-size-fits-all, it's not a solution."
This is to say, if you claim that every problem can be fixed by say, tax breaks, or perhaps, wages rising...then you are being ignorant at best.and disingenuous all the way down.
The majority of economists working in labor policy wind up wanting a higher minimum wage because more purchasing power outstrips the losses from businesses, and that demand will feed into a virtuous cycle a la the multiplier effect. However, very few of those economists will also say that forcing a wage hike will be appropriate for EVERY problem.
Our solutions need to be tailored per industry, per problem, and balanced for the costs of doing so for all affected industries...and the cost of not doing so.
That tends to run into problems when you're playing "match the shape block up with the shape hole" and you've only got rectangular prisms.
So no, tax cut/austerity measure people aren't bad because they want tax cuts -- tax cuts can be useful sometimes. They're bad because they want to treat every problem with tax cuts, all the time. There was a string of post-recession idiocy where they were calling for raising the federal funds rate and lowering taxes which, er..is why everything was fucked at the beginning of the 80s, too.
Basically, a bunch of ignorant people got the wrong idea, and a bunch of much smarter people decided to grift the ignorant people. by abusing that wrong idea. Tax cuts for all, REMEMBER THE ROARING 80s?!
When in reality, it was all caused by bad Fed policy or, "what happens when you don't tailor your solution to your problem," and t hen the subsequent REVERSAL of that policy.
So my point spelled out is that the failures and leaps of logic tax-cut disciples are making wouldn't fail their economic tests, because they would have failed out of class long before, or decided that, since they didn't get hit by a car one day when crossing a busy street, they wouldn't get hit by a car the next.
But that's okay, because in reality, it was never about doing the right thing with regards to economic growth, and especially growth amongst the middle and lower classes. It was all about the grift.
