I thought we already covered this.

Seriously. Laffer Curve? Not in the real world, buddy.

Do Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves?

Not if you read the fine print in the new White House midsession review of budget trends. “While difficult to estimate precisely,” Treasury long-run analyses of the effects of President Bush’s tax cuts “may ultimately” raise total national output of goods and services by 0.7%.

So is that enough to pay for the tax cuts, even after allowing them to work their economic magic over the next 10 years? The Center for Budget Policies and Priorities, a Washington think tank and advocacy group that is distinctly unfriendly to Bush fiscal policies, says it isn’t. “A 0.7 percent increase in the economic output that the Congressional Budget Office has projected for 2016 would represent an additional $146 billion [in gross domestic product],” it says. “If new revenues equaled as much as 20% of the additional output, the increase in revenues resulting from making the tax cuts permanent (assuming Treasury’s best-case assumptions) would be $29 billion.”

That’s a lot of money. But how does it compare to the size of the president’s tax cuts? The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, using conventional analyses, says making the president’s tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues in 2016 by $314 billion. That is more than 10 times what the Treasury analysis suggests tax cuts would generate by prompting more hours of work, more savings and investment and more efficient use of resources.

It's the dumb, dumb dogma that never dies.

Via Ezra Klein.