… they must have something going for them. Klein devotes his latest TIME column to blasting Ryan’s ideas as “puerile,” “not very deep,” and appropriate only for a “libertarian Disneyland.”
Ryan has produced various plans, proposals and two actual federal budgets, and they all have one thing in common: they cut taxes drastically. In his 2011 budget, which he sent to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring, he estimated that despite the drastic cut in rates, the revenue would remain the same as a percentage of gross domestic product. This is supply-side economics, the utterly uncorroborated theory that the less people pay in taxes, the more they’ll produce. Ryan’s mentor Jack Kemp sold Ronald Reagan on it in 1980.
Oh, the horror. Allow people to keep more of their own earnings. Whatever will those crazy, freedom-loving people think of next? Perhaps Joe Klein needs to expand the depth of his knowledge by learning more about supply-side economics.
