Would you trust a doctor who gave the same prescription no matter what your symptoms?

Say you visit the doctor with a sore wrist. He writes you a prescription for some funny sounding medicine. You take it, and the wrist gets worse. But you stop worrying about the wrist when you start having sharp pains in your side. The same doctor prescribes the same medicine, just twice the dosage. You think it strange, but perhaps this stuff is a mystery cure, so you fill the script and take it.

Within days you develop splitting, debilitating headaches. Your wrist still hurts. The pain is still there in your side. But you can’t even think about those minor things, because your headache is so severe you cannot even function to think. So back to the doctor. You guessed it. You need to take four times as much of his one-pill-cures-all potion.

How long would you do this before you finally realized you are dealing with a complete quack who is probably making a fortune with a financial interest in the one pill he pushes to all his patients regardless of their symptoms?

But isn’t that just what the prophets of everlasting tax cuts are doing for the economy? Sure, if taxes are too high they choke the supply side and a tax cut, especially one directed to the rich and corporations, stimulates supply and thus the economy. But we have cut taxes now from an all-time high of 94% on income after the first $400,000 down to 35% and we have added so many loopholes that the very rich now pay a real rate of around 20%.

Now our problem isn’t supply side and budget surplusses. It is demand side (the consumers can’t spend, they are tapped out) and massive budget deficits. But the quacks want to prescribe the same cure no matter what the symptoms. The latest Republican proposal from Paul Ryan proposes another nearly 30% cut in taxes for the top bracket, coupled with tax increases and benefit cuts for the poor, elderly and infirm. Transfer even more of the nation’s wealth to the wealthy. Fix the supply side even though there is no demand. How long will we keep swallowing larger and larger doses of medicine that is making the economy progressively worse?