I did not vote for a "Grand Bargain"

[cthulu2016]

178. That is not supply-side, it is basic Keynes

There is no intrinsic difference between tax cuts and government spending in their effect on stimulating or contracting economic activity and growth.

The differences are entirely practical—effects of who is taxed and/or what the spending is.

The payroll tax holiday is by far the most stimulative tax cut we have ever seen, dollar for dollar. It is economically the same as handing every working person a few bucks a week on the side which is the ultimate in efficacious stimulus spending. A small sum is not typically saved. It is spent.

And raising taxes does, in fact, contract the economy. The contractionary effect of tax hikes for the rich is less than the contractionary effect of tax hikes for the non-rich, but less doesn't mean zero. It is less.

Supply-side is to take all of that and add a plainly false assumption that the most stimulative fiscal policy is tax cuts for the rich. In reality that is the least stimulative. So supply-side is wrong.

But supply-side is no more than that theory that tax cuts for the rich are the best thing for the economy.

The idea that tax cuts, even for the rich, are stimulative is not supply side, it is just Keynes, and one of those theories that has been confirmed so often in the real world that we can treat it as fact.