I don’t usually do policy, mainly because its not the focus of the blog, and because debates about policy tend to get nastier than debates about polling. But for those who like that kind of stuff, I highly recommend QandO as the best policy blog on the net (aside from, say, think tank blogs).

I especially recommend Jon Henke’s post today on Robert Kuttner’s latest call to arms in the American Prospect. As always it is an entertaining read, but it contains a very important nugget of truth. Kuttner has the usual smorgasbord of high-cost things government can spend on, and proposes paying for it with the following:

Reverting to the tax schedule of the pre-Bush code, but preserving the lower taxes on Americans with incomes under $200,000, could easily raise an additional $300 billion a year.

This just isn’t true, and it is one of the dirty little secrets that may or may not come out during the campaign.

Perhaps somebody should hook Robert Kuttner up with the Hillary Clinton campaign, which only estimated the additional revenue from “increasing high-end tax rates” at “$52 billion a year“. And perhaps somebody should hook Robert Kuttner and the Hillary Clinton campaign up with the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the revenue from “Rais[ing] the Top Two Ordinary Tax Rates” back to pre-Bush levels at $29 billion.

Repealing the estate tax repeal outright would bring in about $54 billion in revenues, though I understand even Democrats don’t want to outright repeal the repeal, and would still greatly increase the tax-exempt portions of estates. And finally, capital gains and dividend cuts would net another $25 billion, although this is one of the tax hikes where we could expect to see a significant reverse-supply side effect (no, I don’t believe tax cuts generally increase revenue or vice-versa, but there is almost certainly an effect that deviates from static scoring). Maybe there’s some other $200B big-ticket item hidden there, but I doubt it.

In other words, the money just isn’t there, at least not from soaking the rich. I’m pretty sure the $100B or so that would come from reversing the Bush tax cuts won’t cover universal health care, universal pre-K, increased student loan spending, green jobs initiatives, heading off the social security crisis, increased spending on infrastructure repair, much less “[c]onvert[] the low-wage jobs in the human service sector into good middle-class professional jobs.” To dream big, the Left is going to have to tax much bigger than they’re letting on.

Incidentally, I also have to question the premise that the big government dream has died — what country has Kuttner lived in the past seven years, when we’ve jacked up federal education spending, added a new health care entitlement, and generally spent like drunken sailors in such a way that it makes me long for the Clinton years? All in, government in the US spends about a third of what the country produces, roughly the same as it has for the past thirty years. The Code of Federal Regulations still covers a full seven-shelf bookshelf in my office. The last thirty years may have slowed the growth of government’s advance, but it hasn’t exactly been a return to the Gilded-Age-minarchist-utopia either.