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Message: <blockquote data-quote="804brown" data-source="post: 891529" data-attributes="member: 29553">Heres some info off of Fact check.org:Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has said that the major tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 have "increased revenues." He also said that tax cuts in general increase revenues. That’s highly misleading. In fact, the last half-dozen years have shown us that we can't have both lower taxes and fatter government coffers. The Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers and a former Bush administration economist all say that tax cuts lead to revenues that are lower than they otherwise would have been – even if they spur some economic growth. And federal revenues actually declined at the beginning of this decade before rebounding. The growth in the past three years that McCain refers to brings revenues back in line with the 40-year historical average as a percentage of gross domestic product.It’s unclear how much of the growth can be attributed to the tax cuts. Capital gains tax receipts did increase greatly from 2003 to 2006, but the CBO estimates that they will level off and decrease in the next few years. The growth overwhelmingly resulted from a sharp rise in corporate tax receipts, the cause of which is a topic of debate.“Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts,” Alan D. Viard of the conservative American Enterprise Institute <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601121.html" target="_blank">told </a>the Washington Post last October. Viard, who worked in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis and the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush, told FactCheck.org that “nobody can absolutely prove that.” Proof would require time travel and a reversal of tax policy. “But among economists, there’s no dispute.”The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the 2001 tax legislation (the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act) would cause government revenues to be 107.7 billion less than they would have been in the absence of the legislation in 2004, 107.4 billion less in 2005 and 135.2 billion less in 2006. The committee's estimates for the effect of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 were that it would reduce otherwise projected revenues by 148.7 billion in 2004, 82.2 billion in 2005 and 20.7 billion in 2006. The JCT makes its comparisons against the Congressional Budget Office's receipts baselines.Also, Rob Portman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Ed Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, told journalists at the Washington Times last October that the tax cuts prompted economic and stock market growth. But, the paper reported, “they conceded that the tax cuts…cut deeply into government revenue.” Tax cuts can be a sound economic move that spurs growth, says Viard. “But it doesn’t mean that [the cuts] gained revenue." </blockquote>

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