GOP "Jobs Plan" - Tax Cuts for Dummies?

The Congressional Republicans have offered up - with great fanfare - a jobs plan that has more the characteristics of a children's book than a serious policy proposal. It's a rehash of everything we've ever heard from them before, dumbed down (if one can imagine such a thing) into a menu with tendentious prologue and peppered up with lots of pictures.

Paul Krugman notes, "There’s so little there there that the document — look at it! — has to rely on extra-large type and lots of pointless pictures to bulk it out even to 10 pages."

Nor are Jamielle Bouie, at American Prospect, and  Ezra Klein at Wonkbook impressed.
 
Bouie:

House Republicans have released their plan for "America's Job Creators," and it's underwhelming, to say the least. Clocking in at a whopping 10 pages, it begins  by indicting Democrats for high unemployment, conveniently ignoring the last four years of extreme economic hardship, and blames "taxation," "regulation," and "government takeovers of the economy" for the current mess. What follows is eight pages of silly art, large text, and "solutions" that amount to the same failed Republican playbook of tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts.

Klein has more:

Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around 400. Large-print books — you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan…

When I asked David Autor, an economist at MIT and a specialist on labor markets, to take a look at the substance, he pronounced it a classic case of “what Larry Summers would call ‘now-more-than-everism.’”

“Here’s how it works,” Autor wrote in am e-mail. “1. You have a set of policies that you favor at all times and under all circumstances, e.g., cut taxes, remove regulations, drill-baby-drill, etc. 2. You see a problem that needs fixing (e.g., the economy stinks). 3. You say, ‘We need to enact my favored policies now more than ever.’ I believe that every item in the GOP list that you sent derives from this three step procedure...

“Or, put it differently, is there any set of economic circumstances under which the GOP would not actually want to enact every item on this agenda? If the answer is no, then this is clearly now-more-than-everism.”

If you just read Autor’s answer and then guessed at what’s included in the plan, you’d probably get it about right. The GOP wants a separate congressional vote on every significant regulation. They want to cut taxes for corporations and small-businesses headed by individuals. They want a tax break for profits that corporations earn overseas. They want to pass pending trade agreements, increase domestic production of oil and enact spending cuts...

“At best, an agenda like this is meant to improve long-term growth by a couple of tenths of a percentage point,” says Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “It takes a really long time to move the dial. It’s not a response to a cyclical downturn.”

That’s okay, because the document doesn’t believe in cyclical downturns. It only believes in deviations from the Republican agenda. The first page sets out the GOP’s narrative of the country’s current unemployment crisis. See if you recognize what’s missing here: “For the past four years, Democrats in Washington have enacted policies that undermine these basic concepts which have historically placed America at the forefront of the global marketplace. As a result, most Americans know someone who has recently lost a job, and small businesses and entrepreneurs lack the confidence needed to invest in our economy. Not since the Great Depression has our nation’s unemployment rate been this high this long.”...

But it’s not just that you could read this jobs plan without knowing the financial crisis ever happened. You could read it without knowing the past decade ever happened. As Mishel says, “if lower taxes and less regulation was such good policy, then George W. Bush’s economy would have been a lot better. But under Bush, Republicans cut taxes on business and on investors and high-income people and they didn’t add many regulations and that business cycle was the first one in the post-war period where the income for a typical working class family was lower at the end than at the beginning.”

That, however, is the agenda the House GOP thinks we need. And now more than ever.