Senior Fellow Kevin A. Hassett

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spend a lot of time railing against the Bush tax cuts. Listen to their stump speeches on the topic and you come away with the sense that President Bush, with his irresponsible cuts, has nearly bankrupted the nation. Supporters of the cuts, meanwhile, have viewed them as reasonable, prudent, and fully justified by the latest economic research.

It would be possible to dedicate an entire issue of this magazine to discussing that research and still make little progress toward changing the minds of even the most economically savvy Obama supporters. People who believe that the tax cuts were bad policy tend to put more weight on studies that question the merits of supply-side economics, and less weight on studies that conform to the predictions of Mr. Laffer and his many fans.

But what of the general public? As reporters sort through these debates, they must write at a far lower level of sophistication than that of the studies in question. Since New York Times readers don't know econometrics, they are instead offered pseudo-analysis. The economists who agree with supply-side economics are generally described in terms to suggest that they are nut jobs. Those who disagree with supply-siders are "distinguished professors" or "senior fellows" at "nonpartisan" institutes. We are invited to judge, not the arguments, but the reasonableness of those who make them--and it is clear what our judgment is supposed to be.

But interestingly enough, it's possible to determine with some precision whether a policy has been formulated by nut jobs. To see how, consider the following statement: "U.S. fiscal policy in recent years has deviated wildly from fiscal policy in other developed nations." If that's true, one can presumably make the case that U.S. policymakers have ignored policy norms. (This is of course just what one would expect nut jobs to do.) If the claim is false, however, then it's rather harder to claim that American fiscal policy is in the hands of kooks.

Let's apply that method to the question of income-tax cuts. The nearby chart depicts recent trends in the share of GDP that governments collect through income taxes. The purple line represents the U.S.; the blue line represents the average for large developed nations in the OECD, excluding the U.S. And the story is clear: For most of recent history, the U.S. share was about equal to that of the OECD generally. It did deviate wildly at one point--in the second term of President Clinton, when the U.S. was collecting a markedly higher percentage of its GDP in income-tax revenue than were its fellow OECD members. But the Bush tax cuts returned us to normalcy.

On the matter of tax policy, then, who was more reasonable, Bush or Clinton? The data tell a clear story: that Clinton deviated much farther from the norm than his successor has.

Kevin A. Hassett is a senior fellow and the director of economic policy studies at AEI.