Lowering taxes generates more revenues

Pardon me? Looks like someone has drunk the partisan Kool-Aid and is doing the partisan talking point machine thing again (and may be a bit analytically-challenged and fact-check-challenged).

No, lowering taxes, in general, has a net negative impact on revenues. There is almost universal agreement among well-credentialed economists on that point, even Bush's own current and former top economists.

the Republican Congress balanced the budget with welfare reform and a conservative approach to government in the 90's despite having a democrat in the white house

Where the heck do you get this stuff? Limbaugh? The budget ended up balanced because of revenue growth, which was mainly the result of GDP growth, not due to spending restraint, and the 1993 tax increases helped reduce the deficit.

Geez, man, you gotta get out (of the partisan echo chambers) more.

And here's some reading for you re: the implausibility of solving our fiscal imbalance problem solely on the spending side, as opposed to a combination approach including increases in taxation: WSJ article:

Lifting taxes sufficiently to pay promised Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits would be economically and politically dangerous; reducing future benefits to current tax levels -- while arithmetically possible -- is, at the very least, politically impossible. Voters wouldn't stand for it. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120719284383885607.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

From the American Enterprise Institute:

The three long-term realities are these. First, the middle class will unavoidably bear much of the burden of addressing the long-run fiscal imbalance that we face, whether that imbalance is addressed through entitlement restraint or through tax increases. Second, federal revenue will rise as a share of GDP because the American people will not accept the entitlement restraint that would be required to prevent that development... The rise in federal revenue that I am predicting is not mathematically necessary. Last year, federal revenue was almost 19 percent of GDP, slightly higher than its historical average. If entitlement spending were to remain at its current share of GDP, there would be no need for revenue increases. Under CBO's extended baseline scenario, however, the big three entitlements--Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid--are slated to grow from eight percent of GDP today to 18 percent in 2050. So, keeping these entitlements at a fixed share of GDP would mean cutting them by more than half from their baseline trajectories. Entitlement restraint of that type would be very good for long-run GDP growth, although it might be less desirable in other respects. Whether or not I support that approach, however, the American people do not. In the 2004 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Alan Blinder, along with Alan Kruger, reported public opinion survey results on how to correct the long-run Social security deficit. A mere five percent favored relying mainly on benefit cuts; many of us in this group undoubtedly work at the American Enterprise Institute and other conservative think tanks. In contrast, 30 percent favored relying mainly on payroll tax increases and 34 percent favored a mix of payroll tax increases and benefit cuts. There would surely be even less support for benefit cuts as the main response to the much larger Medicare/ Medicaid imbalance. Given these attitudes, it is fantasy to think that the fiscal imbalance will be addressed solely through entitlement restraint. It is not surprising that progressive price indexation attracted so little support in 2005. The battle will be between exclusive reliance on tax increases and the much preferable alternative of a mix of tax increases and entitlement restraint. Either way, though, revenue will rise as a share of GDP. http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28129/pub_detail.asp

Greg Mankiw, economics professor at Harvard, former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers:

Although the fiscal gap could be completely closed with reduced spending, a realistic political compromise will likely include higher revenues as well. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114903947794967067.html?mod=opinion_main...

Others quoted on the subject in December, 2005 NYT article:

"The current trend points to tax increases in the long run," said Brian M. Riedl, lead budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group opposed to raising taxes. "The political will to make the difficult decisions on spending is lacking." Bruce Bartlett, a leader of the supply-side tax revolution who worked as an economic aide to President Reagan and the first President Bush, has turned on the current president in a coming book, "The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," excoriating what he sees as the government's spending spree over the last five years. Mr. Bartlett, a conservative economic thinker who for years argued that cutting taxes was the best way to "starve the beast" and restrain government's growth, now recommends the introduction of a value-added tax - a kind of sales tax used in Europe and most other advanced industrial nations - to bring in the large amounts of new revenue he deems necessary to close the enormous budget gap. "I do believe tax increases are absolutely inevitable," Mr. Bartlett said. [skip] Beyond the arithmetic difficulties, political complications cloud the prospects for closing the budget deficit with spending cuts. The resistance encountered by the Republican leadership in Congress when it tried to pass a package of spending cuts in November underscored how politically difficult it has become to reduce spending and extend tax cuts at the same time. Peter R. Orszag, a fellow in economic studies at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said the tax cuts enacted since 2001 have produced a loss in revenue equivalent to a full 2 percent of all economic activity, or about $250 billion a year in today's dollars. Ending them would fill much of the near-term budget deficit. "Doing all the deficit reduction on the spending side is implausible," Mr. Orszag said. "Like most things in life, a balance is required."

As a note, a couple of the pieces in the above anticipate and/or advocate new types of taxes and/or increases in taxes other than the income tax or reduction/elimination of deductions.

[edit below, 10/17/08]

Economic growth is essential, but we will not be able to simply grow our way out of the problem. The numbers speak loudly: our projected fiscal gap is simply too great. To “grow our way out” of the current long-term fiscal gap would require sustained economic growth far beyond that experienced in U.S. economic history since World War II.
 

 

Similarly, those who believe we can solve this problem solely by cutting spending or solely raising taxes are not being realistic...

 

given demographic and health care cost trends, the size of the spending cuts necessary to hold revenues at today’s share of GDP seems implausible. It is not realistic to assume we can remain at 18.2 percent of GDP—we will need more revenues. Obviously we want to minimize the tax burden on the American people and we want to remain competitive with other industrial nations—but in the end the numbers have to add up.
 

...we will need more revenues...

 

...Delay only makes matters worse.