I’m still working through my thoughts on the right’s current tax conflict, but here are a couple of quick thoughts,

1. The supporters of focusing tax cuts on high-earners (whether through a flat tax, a national sales tax, or cuts to the top marginal rate) are facing a political environment that does not match up with their Reaganite rhetoric. The tax revolts of the 1970s and 1980s were broadly based in rising residential property taxes at the state and local level and bracket creep at the federal level. Cuts to the then much higher marginal tax rates for high-earners was only part of the package. Our current lower marginal income tax rates on high-earners combined with the dismissal of the payroll tax burdens on parents and those on the other side of the earnings median as special interests turns the supporters of prioritizing high-earner tax cuts into defenders not of Reaganism, but of the left-wing caricature of Reaganism as nothing but trickle down economics. It is telling that this Stephen Moore article contains an implicit argument for a tax increase on people just on the other side of the earnings median.

2. We now have a pretty established pattern in the conventional (pre–Mike Lee) tax debate on the right. We have politicians come out for flat taxes or FairTaxes or 9-9-9s that would either raise taxes on the middleclass or collapse revenues or both. Drawing the federal government’s primary funding from any such scheme is political suicide. When politicians who actually need to get support from the voters face the political abyss, they recoil and propose a children’s strength version of the Kemp-Roth tax cut hoping that nostalgia will keep the coalition together in the absence of policies that actually address the public’s contemporary concerns. The Mike Lee side has its own issues (largely involving crafting a plan that does not collapse revenues), but their advantage is that they are actually trying to deal with people’s direct interactions with policy, rather than hoping that people will buy a policy that is primarily based on the promise of all the good things that will happen to you when taxes are cut on someone else.

3. Supporters of prioritizing high-earner tax cuts and supporters of prioritizing middle-class tax cuts can still work with each other productively on issues like reforming the corporate income tax, regulatory policy, energy policy, and much else.