Did the Bush tax cuts fail?
Via the RSC:
Why weren't even more jobs created during the Bush years? Because we were at full employment for 5.5 years. John Merline says "A key attack line in President Obama's campaign stump speech these days is to claim that the country has tried Mitt Romney's economic policies already, and they were a dismal failure. 'The truth is,' Obama says, 'we tried (that) for almost a decade, and it didn't work.' . . .
"The month after Bush signed that 2003 law, jobs and the economy finally started growing again. From June 2003 to December 2007, the economy added 8.1 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"The unemployment rate fell to 5% from 6.3%. Real GDP growth averaged close to 3% in the four-plus years after that, and the budget deficit fell steadily from 2004 to 2007.
"What's more, the rich ended up paying a larger chunk of the federal income tax burden after Bush's tax cuts went into effect [This is true, I wrote about this in 2006 HERE - PoliticalArena Editor]. Obama is correct that the country has tried a combination of deregulation and tax cuts before; that took place under President Reagan.
"Reagan aggressively deregulated entire industries, while putting the brakes on new federal rules. As a result, regulatory compliance costs fell 8% during his time in office, and staffing dropped almost 7%. At the same time, Reagan's tax cuts knocked taxes as a share of GDP down by 6%.
"The result was an almost eight-year economic boom in which real quarterly GDP growth averaged 4.3%. That's nearly double the average growth rate Obama's economic policies produced during the 3-year-old recovery."