In his latest Bloomberg View column, Ramesh observes that the Republican candidates haven’t been quite so focused on outbidding each other on the size of their proposed tax cuts. This is very much a break from Republican practice for the better part of the last three decades:

[S]upply-side boldness clearly isn’t paying the political dividends its advocates say it should.
The reasons are not hard to guess. The deficit (FDETY) may have finally gotten so large, and our long-term fiscal outlook so bleak, that even Republican voters are less enthusiastic about massive tax cuts that come without matching spending reductions (as in the Santorum, Gingrich, Perry and Pawlenty plans). And the proportion of voters who pay the income tax has fallen a lot since the start of the tax revolt in the late 1970s, so tax plans centered on cutting income-tax rates have less appeal.
I’m still a fan of supply-side economics in general and the Wall Street Journal editorial page in particular. Taxes do reduce the incentive to work, save and invest. We should strive to keep them low. They should be designed to distort economic decisions as little as possible. But these truths, like any truths, can be pushed too far.
The progress of the Republican race suggests that supply- side politics, in its present form, is hitting its limit.

The column is excellent. It also reinforces my sense that “strategic ambiguity” is the wisest course of action for presidential candidates, particularly on taxes. It is possible that specific plans are a good idea, politically and substantively, in some domains, particularly those that are not generally contested on left-right grounds. I’d love to see well-crafted approaches to accelerating the global energy transition to natural gas and nuclear power, for example. On relatively low-salience issues, a detailed agenda could move policy-making efforts. Tax policy is somewhat different. The key issue on taxes is to build a sufficiently broad coalition to pass “permanent” legislation. Articulating broad goals — lowering rates, curbing exemptions — seems like the best way to go.