Though I quite enjoyed the article here, I thought it was not in keeping with the Austrian tradition of intellectual honesty at the end. It says
Also unacknowledged by this White House is how President Kennedy's cut in the top marginal income tax rate produced an immediate increase in federal revenues, or how President Reagan's cut in the top marginal income tax rate was followed by a drop in the unemployment rate in the 1980s from 9.7 percent to 5.3 percent. President Obama's prescription for revenue growth and job growth moves in exactly the opposite direction.
Also unacknowledged by this White House is how President Kennedy's cut in the top marginal income tax rate produced an immediate increase in federal revenues, or how President Reagan's cut in the top marginal income tax rate was followed by a drop in the unemployment rate in the 1980s from 9.7 percent to 5.3 percent.
President Obama's prescription for revenue growth and job growth moves in exactly the opposite direction.
The author is committing the popular correlation->causation fallacy. There are way more factors that determine revenue and unemployment than just the marginal income tax rates. He may address those and arrive at the same conclusion, but he is not. He makes it seem as if the cut in the rate directly led to an increase in revenue and a decrease of unemployment.
Am I over-analyzing this or am I right in my critique?
No I don't think you're going too far. I think that's a legitimate criticism. Even though he's only trying to "speak their language", it could easily be called "stooping to their level" as well.
And while it's probably not a far stretch to say a cut in the tax rate was a direct causal factor in increased revenues, it is definitely a fallacy to automatically attribute a drop in unemplyment (over a decade, no less) to deceased tax rates. And not only that, the notion that Reagan "cut taxes" is a farce in itself.
Yeah it was a perfect article up until that point.
From Richman,
"
In 1980, Jimmy Caner's last year as president, the federal government spent a whopping 27.9% of "national income" (an obnoxious term for the private wealth produced by the American people). Reagan assaulted the free-spending Carter administration throughout his campaign in 1980. So how did the Reagan administration do? At the end of the first quarter of 1988, federal spending accounted for 28.7% of "national income."
Even Ford and Carter did a better job at cutting government. Their combined presidential terms account for an increase of 1.4%—compared with Reagan's 3%—in the government's take of "national income." And in nominal terms, there has been a 60% increase in government spending, thanks mainly to Reagan's requested budgets, which were only marginally smaller than the spending Congress voted"
So what? How do we know those increases weren't from programs already in place before his presidencym which they most likely were? Programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for example. It also strikes me that these criticisms never talk about adjusting for inflation, etc. etc.