One particularly tough and indigestible nugget of talk-radio stupidity afflicting the guts of conservatism is the idea that there is some sort of fundamental difference between bribing a business with tax cuts and bribing it with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The Trump-Pence bailout of Carrier’s operations in Indiana provides an illustrative case. This is an example of banality hardening into orthodoxy, the worst habit of the pop-con mind. It started with a good point. Once upon a time, U.S. personal-income tax rates were very high: 91 percent in the Eisenhower years, though hardly anybody paid that rate. Democrats such as John Kennedy and Republicans such as Ronald Reagan believed that these rates were far too high. Both Kennedy and Reagan made what we might broadly call “Laffer curve” arguments for tax cuts, though Reagan’s actual budget proposals were not quite as sunny as Arthur Laffer tends to be on the question of the real budgetary effects of tax-rate reductions. Milton Friedman took a more gimlet-eyed view with his advice that if tax cuts produce revenue growth, then you haven’t cut them enough.
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