How Low Can Taxes Go? Outside Washington, Republicans Find Limits<br />“If there were three words I could say to Congress right now,” said Stephanie Clayton, a Republican<br />state representative from a district in the Kansas City area, “they would be, ‘Don’t do it.’”<br />She criticized what she said was a desire by her party to be more faithful to the principle than to the people Republicans were elected to help.<br />In urging the Kansas Legislature to act, Mr. Laffer and Mr. Moore said the cuts would have a “near immediate” positive impact on the economy.<br />Mr. Brownback and many conservatives, she said, overpromised on the tax cuts as a “sort-of Ayn Rand utopia,<br />a red-state model,” citing the author whose works have influenced the American libertarian movement.<br />Steven T. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said the Trump tax cuts would pay for themselves with the economic growth they would inevitably create.<br />Much of the devotion to tax cuts as an inviolable Republican principle stems from the success<br />that President Ronald Reagan and Congress had in 1981 when they agreed to an economic recovery package that included a rate cut of about 25 percent for individuals.<br />“A fantastic way to go,” he said this year, urging Mr. Trump and Congress to follow suit with deep reductions to corporate and individual rates.<br />With the federal deficit growing and economic growth sputtering along in the low single digits, the Republican Party is facing questions from within over what many see as a blind faith in the theory<br />that deep tax cuts are the shot of economic adrenaline a languid economy needs.<br />After Mr. Brownback took office in 2011, he pursued a plan<br />that included cuts and, in some cases, an outright elimination of taxes for businesses and individuals to help invigorate the state’s underperforming economy.
