Our boy has apparently decided that the way to get back in the Republican race is to offer the biggest, most pandering tax cut of all. An unnamed fiscal policy expert has been quoted in blogs elsewhere as saying that Rudy's tax cut package is "huge," about 4 percent of GDP, or more than twice the size of the Reagan or Bush tax cuts.
Since the present value of all future US GDP under current projections is probably a bit over $800 trillion, this implies that the Rudy tax cuts would add more than $30 trillion to the fiscal gap. This is about 50 percent bigger than Medicare prescription drugs and 3 times bigger than the Social Security shortfall.
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And yet the theme of David Brooks’ rambling column today is that “smart Republicans are groping for a new economic model” other than one regarding tax cuts as an exclusive panacea. He concludes by noting that Republicans are shifting their emphasis “from tax cutting to fiscal rectitude.” Yet it appears that most of the GOP presidential hopefuls continue to equate the two.
Brant Hellwig
I think Brooks is a bit ahead of the curve in claiming things have changed. Most of the stuff he mentioned in his column seemed either trivial, unlikely to help the stated problems (e.g., child credits, even if a good idea distributionally, really don't address the need for education), or orthogonal to the supply side debate.
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