Mitch McConnell can't read a graph.

In what has to be considered an indictment of the failures of our education system Mitch McConnell recently stated:

"There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue,"

Ezra Klein has some great information on this topic. My favorite being:

Mark Zandi, an adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign, estimated (pdf) that a dollar spent extending the Bush tax cuts would generate .32 cents of taxable economic activity, while a dollar spent on unemployment benefits would generate $1.61 of taxable economic activity.

Below is a graph that I put together which is similar to a graph the Heritage Foundation put together on Federal Revenue (Red) over the years with the Federal Budget (Blue) for each year.



As my first grader can tell you there is a definite drop in the red line starting after the year 2000. I'm not sure how Sen. McConnell can say "no evidence whatsoever" when clearly this is evidence to contradict his statement.

The point Sen. McConnell is trying to make is that tax cuts don't need to be paid for because they pay for themselves. Again if you have two eyes you can see Mitch McConnell is full of shit. Over the best five years under Clinton, with higher taxes, the revenue for the government increased by a little under 40% over those five years while the best five year stretch for Bush was 44%. This means we lost trillions of dollars of possible revenue because of the Bush tax cuts. If Sen. McConnell was right and tax cuts paid for themselves then the best five year stretch for Bush would have needed an increase of 58% over five years to just get us back to the revenue this graph suggests we would have ended up at had we left the Clinton tax rates in place. It would take approximately 25 years for these tax cuts to pay for themselves if we campare the best case scenario for the Bush tax cuts. If you throw in a sixth year the Bush tax cuts would never pay for themselves compared with the Clinton growth.

I'm not sure there is anything more damning of the Republicans lack of understanding of economics than this.