I’m actually impressed. A plurality of Americans understand that “soak the rich” isn’t the best strategy to bring about economic recovery. But I do have to pick a fight over this:

Said pollster Cliff Young: “Americans want to have their cake and eat it too. They want tax cuts on the one hand but they want to reduce the budget on the other.”

First Read notes how Republicans leaders “haven’t had an easy time reconciling their pursuit to extend the Bush tax cuts — even for families earning more than $250,000 per year — with their stated desire to also reduce the size of the deficit.”

Actually, it’s perfectly consistent to push for tax cuts and a reduction in the benefit.

First of all, the deficit is caused by government overspending — not government undertaxing. It’s possible to simultaneously think that Americans should keep more of their own money and the deficit should be reduced. It just requires significant cuts to federal spending and reform of other appropriations.

Second, tax cuts actually have a history of increasing tax revenue. I’ll provide a quote and you guess who said it:

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

Who said it? Ronald Reagan, maybe? Nope. George W. Bush? Nope. That above paragraph is a direct quote from President John F. Kennedy — a Democrat. And he was right: His across-the-board tax cuts increased revenue by 62% between 1961 and 1968.

But how is that possible? As Kennedy explained above, cutting taxes stimulates economic growth. The new economic activity spurred by the cuts leads to other sources of revenue, including income tax from new jobs created when you let companies and employers keep more of their own money.

It’s entirely possible to support both tax cuts and fiscal responsibility, no matter how many times tax-and-spend liberals tell us we must choose between the two.