argumate:

collapsedsquid:

Most conservatives
believe that the best way to downsize government is to take away its allowance,
as Ronald Reagan once put it. In other words, tax cuts will lead to spending
cuts. This is a theory I once subscribed to. Back in the days when people cared
about federal budget deficits, there was a case to be made that intentionally
increasing the deficit by reducing revenues would put downward pressure on
spending. Today, unfortunately, the evidence seems to point in exactly the
opposite direction.

At the time that I drafted the Kemp-Roth tax bill, in 1977, the Republican
Party still believed that budget deficits were evil. Republicans would often
even support tax increases, such as in 1969, to balance the budget. But they
came to believe that higher taxes only encouraged higher spending—until a
politically intolerable deficit emerged, at which point they would again be
pressured to support tax increases. Eventually, Republicans like Newt Gingrich
would charge that their party had become the tax collector for the welfare
state. …

At this point, in the late 1970’s, a few conservatives like Jack Kemp …
said to heck with the balanced budget. Let’s just cut taxes and see what
happens. Mr. Kemp predicted that economic growth would rise so much that
revenues might not even fall.

Most mainstream conservatives didn’t buy Mr. Kemp’s strategy right away. But
after Californians passed Proposition 13 in 1978, they could see that tax
cutting was politically popular. They had also learned the hard way that trying
to cut spending at a time when revenue was rapidly rising was politically
impossible.

So Republican Congressional leaders and conservative economists like Alan
Greenspan … came to support tax cuts as a strategy to force spending cuts.
David Stockman, who was … director of the Office of Management and Budget
under President Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic converts to what came to
be called the “starve the beast” theory of taxation.

The subtext to this 2006 piece that he doesn’t quite say is that “Starve the Beast“ is an attempt by republican administrations to force future democratic administrations to cut programs by forcing a crisis.

bold of them to assume a crisis won’t lead to unexpected and unwanted outcomes