Republicans Rejected Congressional Research Service Report that found No Correlation between Tax Cuts and Economic Growth!

You would think news this big would be a major factor in the presidential election. The idea of a supply side/tax cuts for the wealthy economic system, is nothing more than a totally debunked model now:

NY Times: The Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording. Sen. Mitch McConnell and other senators “raised concerns about the methodology and other flaws.” 

It's always something isn't it? But typically, this was another missed opportunity for Democrats, who ignored the rejected report, until now:

“This has hues of a banana republic,” Mr. Schumer said. “They didn’t like a report, and instead of rebutting it, they had them take it down.”

The rise of the tea party was the result of soft media coverage of the radicalization of the Republican Party. This downward slide continues as the media allows the GOP to successfully discredit every source of professional legitimate criticism. 

The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical.

Fact checkers be damned policy: The Bureau of Labor Statistics released (the) unemployment figures for October, a month after some conservatives denounced its last report as politically tinged to abet President Obama’s re-election. When the bureau suggested its October report might be delayed by Hurricane Sandy, some conservatives immediately suggested politics were at play.

Republicans have also tried to discredit the private Tax Policy Center ever since the research organization declared that Mitt Romney’s proposal to cut tax rates by 20 percent while protecting the middle class and not increasing the deficit was mathematically impossible. 

And as things get worse in the U.S., Republicans will use the bad news as proof more needs to be done their way to turn things around.

Congressional aides and outside economists said they were not aware of previous efforts to discredit a study from the research service. Economist Jared Bernstein said, “I’ve never seen anything like this, and frankly, it makes me worried.”

If Romney wins, and/or the senate is taken over by Republicans, can we say at this point we were all appropriately warned? The reports shocking conclusion couldn't be clearer:

The Sept. 28 decision to withdraw the report was made against the advice of the research service’s economics division … The report examined the historical fluctuations of the top income tax rates and the rates on capital gains since World War II, and concluded that those fluctuations did not appear to affect the nation’s economic growth.

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie,” the report said. “However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”