John Yarmuth: “It is a road we've been down before. Back under the Reagan administration, this whole magical economic theory of…”

“It is a road we've been down before. Back under the Reagan administration, this whole magical economic theory of trickle-down economics was developed. And the idea was, you let people at the top make as much as they possibly can, do as well as they possibly can, and that will trickle down and help everybody else. The man who was largely responsible for that policy under the Reagan administration, David Stockman, who was his budget director, he said just last year, ``I find it unconscionable that the Republican leadership, faced with a $1.5 trillion deficit, could possibly believe that good public policy is to maintain tax cuts for the top 2 percent.'' That was last year when we were actually debating whether to return to the Clinton-era tax rates--the Clinton era, by the way, which resulted in one of the most impressive decades of job growth in this country. Now they even want to double down on that. They not only don't want to go back to the Clinton era tax cuts; they want to cut it even further. And their theory is that by cutting the tax rate by 10 percent more on the wealthiest people in this country, that they will create more jobs. Where do they get this stuff? Well, the only source they have for that theory is the Heritage Foundation. Now the Heritage Foundation was also the group that said that if we cut taxes under the Bush administration, that we're going to have this enormous job growth and this enormous surplus. It didn't quite work out so well.…”