Universality, Market Justice, Wasteful Government: The Legitimacy of Tax Cuts 
on Higher Incomes in the United States 1981-2001

Rademacher, Inga

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Universality, Market Justice, Wasteful Government: The Legitimacy of Tax Cuts on Higher Incomes in the United States 1981-2001

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Rademacher, Inga
International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, MPI for the Study of Societies, Max Planck Society;
Department for Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK;

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http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2018/06/25/speri-paper-44-new-paper-by-inga-rademacher-on-the-legitimacy-of-tax-cuts-in-the-united-states/
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Citation

Rademacher, I. (2018). Universality, Market Justice, Wasteful Government: The Legitimacy of Tax Cuts on Higher Incomes in the United States 1981-2001. SPERI Paper, 44.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-C9FA-2

Abstract

The growing acceptance of neoliberal tax cuts, concessions in redistribution and increasing inequality among American policy makers since the 1980s is often ascribed to rising authority of the economics profession. But through content analysis the paper shows that the two largest tax cuts in American history, the Reagan tax cut in 1981 and the George W. Bush tax cut in 2001, only persisted when the Republican Party developed strong normative narratives of universality, market justice and wasteful government which pushed Democratic arguments in the cognitive realm. Dr Rademacher argues that this normative imbalance is the source of growing acceptance of neoliberalism and that the power of normative arguments is greater than the power of economic theory in legitimating inequality.