The Voodoo That They Do So Well

Jon Chait: "Deficit hawks have a common trope of drawing parallels between right-wing critics who don't want to raise taxes and left-wing critics who don't want to cut entitlement spending. It's not a very good parallel. Liberals have an ideological preference for a larger welfare state, with tax rates closer to the range found in Western Europe. But they do accept the factual premise that reducing spending on entitlement programs would, in fact, decrease the budget deficit. They simply find that outcome undesirable.  Meanwhile conservatives not only prefer much smaller government, they constantly deny that increasing the revenue base will actually reduce the budget deficit. One such theory is that increasing tax rates reduces tax revenue. Another theory is that increasing tax rates increases revenue but then, through political voodoo, causes spending to increase by an equal or greater amount."