Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Ezra Klein notes Lawrence Kudlow declaring that he wants to the GOP to lose forever:

This idea of rewarding work instead of wealth is just insane

To translate out of wingnutese, Kudlow is saying that we should be cutting income, capital gains and corporate taxes more, because they tax wealth, and shouldn’t be cutting the payroll tax, which directly taxes work. Now putting aside whether Kudlow’s supply side reverence for reducing taxes on capital

They’re politically insane because taxes, especially income taxes, can’t get much lower. In case Kudlow didn’t notice, we’re running a pretty dig deficit, and with medicare about to get a whole lot more expensive, not to mention the continuing cost of the war, we’re going to have higher taxes. This is just a fact that other Republican supply-siders have already reconciled themselves with – even Grover Norquist says that letting the Bush tax cuts expire wouldn’t violate the no new taxes pledge. So not only is Kudlow’s agenda probably not going to be actualized anytime soon, it’s also politically inane.

As David Frum has pointed out over and over, most Americans don’t pay that much income tax.* Especially those “Sam’s Club Republicans” from the broad, GOP, under 100K middle class. Republicans will never have a problem getting the plutocracy to support them, it’s those voters that they’ve lured in with social and cultural issues that they’re going to have to work to retain. And those voters don’t have a ton of wealth that gets taxed, so more capital gains and income cuts aren’t going to do anything for them. Payroll taxes, on the other hand, take a much larger chunk out of their incomes.

But if Kudlow wants to promote fiscally irresponsible, politically deadly tax cuts and fiscal policy that will keep his party in the wilderness, that’s fine with me.

* Here’s the relevant excerpt from Comeback.

Four out of five taxpayers now pay more in payroll taxes than federal income
taxes. Some 29 million income-earning American households pay no income tax at all.1 By contrast, the notorious top 1 percent of taxpayers pay well over one-third of all U.S. income taxes.