How Low Can Taxes Go? Outside Washington, Republicans Find Limits
“If there were three words I could say to Congress right now,” said Stephanie Clayton, a Republican
state representative from a district in the Kansas City area, “they would be, ‘Don’t do it.’”
She criticized what she said was a desire by her party to be more faithful to the principle than to the people Republicans were elected to help.
In urging the Kansas Legislature to act, Mr. Laffer and Mr. Moore said the cuts would have a “near immediate” positive impact on the economy.
Mr. Brownback and many conservatives, she said, overpromised on the tax cuts as a “sort-of Ayn Rand utopia,
a red-state model,” citing the author whose works have influenced the American libertarian movement.
Steven T. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said the Trump tax cuts would pay for themselves with the economic growth they would inevitably create.
Much of the devotion to tax cuts as an inviolable Republican principle stems from the success
that President Ronald Reagan and Congress had in 1981 when they agreed to an economic recovery package that included a rate cut of about 25 percent for individuals.
“A fantastic way to go,” he said this year, urging Mr. Trump and Congress to follow suit with deep reductions to corporate and individual rates.
With the federal deficit growing and economic growth sputtering along in the low single digits, the Republican Party is facing questions from within over what many see as a blind faith in the theory
that deep tax cuts are the shot of economic adrenaline a languid economy needs.
After Mr. Brownback took office in 2011, he pursued a plan
that included cuts and, in some cases, an outright elimination of taxes for businesses and individuals to help invigorate the state’s underperforming economy.