Supply-sider Stephen Moore, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, again suggests that tax cuts increase revenue:

The quality of this discourse rarely rises above the level of trash talk. Nevertheless, some arguments are repeated with such regularity that they need to be addressed. One is that supply-siders dishonestly claim that tax rate cuts increase tax revenues. Now, we can argue forever whether tax revenues would have been higher or lower without the Bush 2003 tax cuts. But one stubborn fact remains: Tax receipts are up, not down, by $745 billion in four years since the 2003 tax cuts.

It’s one thing for the supply-side critics to have predicted four years ago that the Bush tax cuts would increase the budget deficit. But Mr. Surowiecki tells us, today, that “myriad studies” find that the Bush tax cuts “led to bigger budget deficits.”

Bigger deficits? After the second Bush tax cut of 2003, the budget deficit tumbled to $163 billion in FY 2007 from $401 billion in FY 2003.

The point is obviously disingenuous. The consensus among economists, including those who work for the Bush administration, is that tax cuts decrease revenue all else equal. The fact that revenue has increased and deficits have declined over time proves nothing. Revenue would have increased more and the deficit would have declined more had the tax cuts not been in effect.

(For more on Stephen Moore, see my posts on him and our writing about him at Spinsanity.)

Update 11/14 10:09 AM: Donald Luskin makes a similar claim in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

When [rich people stop working in response to tax increases], Mr. Rangel will get a lesson in supply-side economics he’ll never forget. Some say that the Laffer Curve is wrong, and that tax cuts don’t result in higher tax revenues. But when America’s most productive workers stop working — even a little bit — in reaction to the incentive effects of the “mother of all tax reform plans,” they’ll see that the Laffer Curve was right after all, and that it can cut both ways. Involuntary tax hikes result in voluntarily lower tax revenues.