On Wednesday, President Bush claimed that tax cuts increase revenue. On Thursday, as the Washington Post reports, Vice President Cheney did the same thing:

Vice President Cheney said Thursday night that the verdict is in before the Bush administration’s new tax analysis shop has even opened for business: Tax cuts boost federal government revenue.

That assertion won applause from his audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, but it is a long-standing source of debate among many economists and tax experts at a time of rising federal budget deficits.

Cheney touted President Bush’s recently announced proposal to create a tax analysis division as a move toward providing more evidence for the administration’s side of the argument.

“The president’s tax policies have strengthened the economy, as we knew they would,” Cheney told the conference, according to a text posted on the White House’s Web site. “And despite forecasts to the contrary, the tax cuts have translated into higher federal revenues.”

Cheney said some forecasters have underestimated the degree to which tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and tax revenue.

“It’s time to reexamine our assumptions and to consider using more dynamic analysis to measure the true impact of tax cuts on the American economy,” Cheney said, explaining why Bush has proposed the new Treasury Department division. “The evidence is in, it’s time for everyone to admit that sensible tax cuts increase economic growth and add to the federal treasury.”

Creating a “tax analysis” office to reach a pre-ordained conclusion tells you everything you need to know about the White House’s postmodern approach to empirical analysis. It’s faith-based economics.

In reality, there’s a complicated debate about the magnitude of the revenue losses attributable to tax cuts, but almost no professional economist believes tax cuts increase revenue overall. In fact, as Jonathan Chait pointed out in The New Republic, even the proponents of supply-side economics now disavow this claim.

Not surprisingly, President Bush’s economists agree with this professional consensus. As I noted on Spinsanity, the 2003 Economic Report of the President (PDF) states that tax cuts are “unlikely” to pay for themselves:

The modest effect of government debt on interest rates does not mean that tax cuts pay for themselves with higher output. Although the economy grows in response to tax reductions (because of higher consumption in the short run and improved incentives in the long run), it is unlikely to grow so much that lost tax revenue is completely recovered by the higher level of economic activity.

In addition, as I pointed out in a later Spinsanity column, former Bush Council of Economic Advisers chair N. Gregory Mankiw also stated during his confirmation hearings that he “remain[ed] skeptical” of claims that tax cuts were “completely self-financing.”

Post reporter Dana Milbank noted the contradiction between the Economic Report of the President and Bush’s statements in a February 2003 piece that cited my article, yet Niall Henderson, the author of the article about Cheney’s speech, gives readers almost no indication how implausible the views of the President and Vice President really are.

Instead, Henderson gives readers this weak passage, which is almost a parody of “he said,” “she said” journalism:

Some tax-cut proponents contend that tax cuts can essentially pay for themselves by spurring such strong economic growth that the additional tax revenue more than offsets the money lost to the cuts.

Many economists dispute that, arguing that the effects of tax cuts depend on how they are structured, on economic circumstances and on many other variables.

“All economists agree tax policy has an effect on the economy. The hard thing is to figure out how to measure these effects in the real world,” said Leonard E. Burman, co-director of the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.

Is that really the best the Post can do?