“If you go back to when John F. Kennedy Jr. cut taxes, if you go back to the last time we transformed our tax code – 1986 when Ronald Reagan was president – you can go to the Clinton years,” Scalise said. “Every time we’ve cut taxes you’ve seen the economy take off.”
Later, Scalise added: “So if you look at history, every time this has been done it’s worked. Why not do it again, especially when you’ve got a slow economy?”
But Scalise conveniently overlooked the fact that the most recent time trickle-down economics was tried, it failed.
In 2001, President Bush shepherded tax cuts through Congress that mainly benefited high earners, as would also be the case under the current GOP plan. But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities wrote in a recent look at the legacy of the Bush tax cuts, although Republicans said they would dramatically spur growth, “evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”
