You can fool some of the people all of the time

Cut taxes. Raise defense spending. Balance the budget. That, in a nutshell, is the promise of Mitt Romney's 162-page, 59-point economic plan. But if that refrain sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. After all, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and the leading lights of the Republican Party have been repackaging that same formula for over three decades.

But repeating the same falsehood'even for 30-plus years'doesn't make it any truer. As it turns out, that patron saint of small government Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt during his tenure, while Bush nearly doubled it again by January 2009. While their supply-side snake oil did not match the economic growth and job creation of periods of higher (even much higher) taxation, it did produce staggering increases in income inequality.

Now, Mitt Romney and his Republican allies are counting on Americans having short memories and bad math skills. For today's Party of Lincoln, the message for 2012 is clear: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's our target market.

From the beginning, even some of Ronald Reagan's water carriers were skeptical of his campaign pledge to balance the federal budget and cut personal taxes by 30 percent in three years. As William Kristol later admitted, "I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities."

Kristol was proven right on both counts. But as most analysts predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-setting debt. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes 11 times to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder that, three decades after he concluded "the supply-siders have gone too far," former Arthur Laffer acolyte and Reagan budget chief David Stockman lamented:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ambled in the White House in January 2001, they weren't shy about making that same point, albeit with a different spin.

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