Conservatives vs. Economic Truth, Again

Oh, this is just great:

The Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.

Read into the article and you can see, first, that there are some wording issues one could quibble with; the report uses the word "rich" to describe rich people, rather than the "upper income" one would expect in a government report. Then you get into the substantive argument. It is probably true, as the Republican staffers quoted in the article say, that the economy is affected by a lot of things, so you can't just compare growth rates in the year before and the year after a tax cut and see what the impact was. But that argument undercuts the case for tax cuts; if the effect is not big enough to stand out against the background noise of all the thousand other economic factors, it can't be that important, can it? And you certainly can't budget on the assumption that tax cuts will increase growth, as some Republicans have argued. ("Dynamic scoring," they call this.)

The truth is that tax rates are just one of the million things that impact economic performance, and they are far from the most important. So an economic policy that relies mostly on tax cuts is just not going to accomplish very much.