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I know–that’s a silly question; just use the search feature on this blog and plug in “Bush tax cuts” and you’ll find out.

Perhaps I’ve not mentioned as often or as explicitly that Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan Administration supply-side economist, isn’t that fond of the Bush tax cuts either.  Why, an entire chapter in Bruce’s book “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy” (gee, don’t be so shy, Bruce!) is called “Why the Bush Tax Cuts Didn’t Deliver.”  Bruce published this column on The Daily Beast this week–a condensed version of his scathing critique of Bush Administration economic policy, put in the context of the “GOP’s Misplaced Rage.”  In it, Bruce reminds us what’s not to love–even if you’re an ardent supply-sider–about the Bush tax cuts:

[C]onservatives have an absurdly unjustified view that Republicans have a better record on federal finances. It is well-known that Clinton left office with a budget surplus and Bush left with the largest deficit in history. Less well-known is Clinton’s cutting of spending on his watch, reducing federal outlays from 22.1 percent of GDP to 18.4 percent of GDP. Bush, by contrast, increased spending to 20.9 percent of GDP. Clinton abolished a federal entitlement program, Welfare, for the first time in American history, while Bush established a new one for prescription drugs.

Conservatives delude themselves that the Bush tax cuts worked and that the best medicine for America’s economic woes is more tax cuts; at a minimum, any tax increase would be economic poison. They forget that Ronald Reagan worked hard to pass one of the largest tax increases in American history in September 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, even though the nation was still in a recession that didn’t end until November of that year. Indeed, one could easily argue that the enactment of that legislation was a critical prerequisite to recovery because it led to a decline in interest rates. The same could be said of Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which many conservatives predicted would cause a recession but led to one of the biggest economic booms in history.

According to the CBO, federal taxes will amount to just 15.5 percent of GDP this year. That’s 2.2 percent of GDP less than last year, 3.3 percent less than in 2007, and 1.8 percent less than the lowest percentage recorded during the Reagan years. If conservatives really believe their own rhetoric, they should be congratulating Obama for being one of the greatest tax cutters in history.

Conservatives will respond that some tax cuts are good while others are not. Determining which is which is based on something called supply-side economics. Because I was among those who developed it, I think I can speak authoritatively on the subject. According to the supply-side view, temporary tax cuts and tax credits are economically valueless. Only permanent cuts in marginal tax rates will significantly raise growth.

On this basis, we see that Bush’s tax cuts were pretty much the opposite of what supply-side economics would recommend. The vast bulk of his tax cuts involved tax rebates—which failed in 2001 and again in 2008, because the vast bulk of the money was saved—or tax credits that had no incentive effects. While marginal rates were cut slightly—the top rate fell from 39.6 percent to 35 percent—it was phased in slowly and never made permanent. Neither were Bush’s cuts in capital gains and dividend taxes.

Bruce didn’t get to elaborate on what seems a contradiction between his view that we haven’t been raising enough revenue and his suggestion that the marginal rate reductions would have been better if they were enacted permanently from the start.  I think Bruce would agree with me that even permanent cuts in marginal tax rates aren’t necessarily “worth it” from an economic growth perspective if they reduce national saving by increasing the federal budget deficit.  (Public saving plus private saving equals national saving.)  It’s a matter of the costs of the tax cuts relative to their benefits.  The best way to get “supply side” economics to work in tax policy is to reduce marginal tax rates while raising the same amount of revenue.  How do you do that?  Not by merely counting on the tax base to grow on its own after the (uncertain) incentive effects of the rate reduction kick in.  You raise the same amount of revenue right away (with certainty) by not limiting your policy levers to just adjusting tax rates.  The far more significant contributor to how efficient (or not) the tax system is, is the tax base and how broad and level you make it.  And yes, policymakers can make it as broad and level as the current economic base will allow.

That’s why the two concerns Bruce has about the Bush tax cuts–(1) that they were and are unaffordable; and (2) that they did not permanently reduce marginal tax rates and hence weren’t true “supply side” tax cuts–lead to only one conclusion, and that’s that we need to be thinking more seriously about fundamental (truly base-broadening, keep-rates-low) tax reform.

But of course, now it’s the Obama Administration who’s in charge, and they’ve decided to include $2 trillion worth of deficit-financed Bush tax cuts in their own 10-year budget–that’s $2 trillion of the possible $2.6 trillion of the entirety of the Bush tax cuts.

So left-leaning commentators are reiterating their disdain towards the Bush tax cuts:

[by Robert Creamer on Huffington Post:] [L]et’s be clear, the Bush tax cuts didn’t just produce fewer jobs than advertised. They didn’t produce any private sector jobs at all. The whole experiment in handing over money to the wealthiest people in America so they could use it to benefit the rest of us was a colossal - empirically verifiable - failure.

Turns out that when given the chance to use all of those tax cuts, the top two percent of the population used them to speculate in exotic derivatives, to drive up the prices of high end real estate, pay exorbitant prices to the designers of $4,000 blouses and $2,000 shoes. There is absolutely no evidence that they made any more investments in new manufacturing plants, or started up any more businesses than they would have had they paid the same tax rates that they did when Ronald Reagan took office and private sector job growth was 3% per year.

No, instead the rich used the Bush Tax Cuts to create the gigantic economic “bubble” that ultimately burst and caused immeasurable hardship and suffering to millions of average Americans and everyday people across the globe.

Bottom line is that the rich sold America a bill of goods. Give us big tax cuts and we’ll give you jobs growth, they told us. America kept its end of the bargain, and the rich reneged entirely on theirs.

In a word, the economic theories of the Republicans and the Right were simply wrong. In fact, they were elaborate intellectual justifications for the richest among us to enrich themselves even more…

…but are failing to recognize that almost all of the tax cuts that President Obama has proposed–and in fact all of the deficit-financed tax cuts President Obama has proposed–are in fact the old “Bush tax cuts,” which will now become the “Obama tax cuts” as soon as President Obama signs the extension into law before the end of next year.  And while those who have hated the Bush tax cuts but love President Obama would like to believe that President Obama is letting the worst part of the Bush tax cuts (those “for the rich”) expire, the truth is that the “Obama tax cuts” will still go disproportionately to “the rich,” even with the upper tax brackets expiring.

Yep.  The Bush/Obama tax cuts are a sad truth that all of us (Reagan supply-siders, Clinton fiscal conservatives, and even the most liberal of Obama supporters) don’t want to believe our new President who stood for “change” could let happen.