Incidentally, Democrats have not offered a single spending cut proposal during their time at the helm. Not one. That’s just one reason why—not to mention what I expect to be continuing growth in 2008— I believe the economic pendulum will soon swing in favor of the GOP.

There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). Goldilocks is alive and well. The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.

Larry Kudlow.

In any case, you understand that there was a surplus under the Clinton administration for the first time in 30 years?

Perhaps your appreciation of Clinton’s economic achievements is clouded by your fixation on the Clinton hit squads taking out Ron Brown and Vince Foster.

it took the fiscal discipline of Bill Clinton to mop up the resulting red ink.

Oh My!
If his name wasn’t laffer, he would need a name change.

If I may intrude on the schoolyard squabble many readers here may find interesting this debunking by conservative economists the notion that tax cuts raise revenue:

If there’s one thing that economists agree on, it’s that these claims are false. We’re not talking just ivory-tower lefties. Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves–and were never intended to. Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, even devotes a section of his best-selling economics textbook to debunking the claim that tax cuts increase revenues.

The yawning chasm between Republican rhetoric on taxes and even informed conservative opinion is maddening to those of wonkish bent. Pointing it out has become an opinion-column staple. But none of these screeds seem to have altered the political debate. So rather than write yet another, I decided to find out what Arthur Laffer thought.

Laffer is a bona fide economist with a doctorate from Stanford. He’s also largely responsible for the Republican belief that tax cuts pay for themselves. Now 67, Laffer runs economic-consulting and money-management firms in Nashville. About the best I could get out of him on the question of whether the Bush tax cuts have paid for themselves was “I don’t know.”

How now, wool-sack, what mutter you?