Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

Calling it an "absurd theory" is Blumenthal doing two things at once: puncturing a technocratic claim and indicting the political storytelling that keeps it alive. The target is the supply-side promise, popularized in late-20th-century U.S. conservatism, that tax cuts can pay for themselves via turbocharged growth. Blumenthal’s phrasing turns that promise into slapstick. "Overflow" and "fall into the government coffers" evokes a cartoonish fountain of money - a passive windfall requiring no tradeoffs, no hard choices, no losers. That imagery is the point: he’s not debating marginal rates so much as mocking the fantasy of fiscal gravity being suspended.

The intent is polemical, but it’s also journalistic in the old sense: to strip a policy argument down to its marketing copy and show the seams. By framing the idea as a theory that assumes wealth will spill, almost accidentally, into public hands, he spotlights the emotional seduction underneath: the desire for painless governance. Everyone gets tax relief; the state still gets funded; nobody has to admit what gets cut, borrowed, or deferred.

Subtextually, Blumenthal is accusing the theory of being less economics than permission structure. If leaders can claim tax cuts increase revenue, they can shrink government while denying responsibility for deficits, reframing austerity as inevitability rather than choice. The context is the long Reagan-to-post-Reagan cycle where "dynamic scoring" and Laffer-curve rhetoric became a kind of ideological talisman, useful even when empirical results were mixed. His jab lands because it treats the claim not as a contested model, but as a fairy tale designed for believers.