Have my cake or eat it? Those are false choices.

I was puzzled when a recent spate of articles claimed that Bush's tax cuts had increased federal revenue. But I moved on to other issues without checking into that supply-side paradox. Similar, more recent reports that the deficit is "being cut" were clearly the product of lazy reporters or spin merchants-- and unsurprisingly, so were the tax revenue stories.

Alan D. Viard, a former Bush White House economist currently at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, recently told The Washington Post: "Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There's really no dispute among economists about that."

He's right. There's no dispute among economists. Conservative, moderate, or liberal, every credentialed economist agrees that the Bush tax cuts caused revenues to drop. There is, however, a dispute between economists and pseudo-economists. Supply-siders may be laughed at by real economists, but they still enjoy a strong following among politicians, including, alas, the president of the United States. Here is what President Bush said a week and a half ago:

They said that we had to choose between cutting the deficit and keeping taxes low--or another way to put it, that in order to solve the deficit we had to raise taxes. I strongly disagree with those choices. Those are false choices. Tax relief fuels economic growth, and growth--when the economy grows, more tax revenues come to Washington. And that's what's happened. It makes sense, doesn't it?"

Well, no, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Recommended reading for its look at tax revenue and the economy under Bush and Clinton-- and the way "voodoo economics" keeps rising from the grave, it needs to be put down once and for all.