ALEC’s sneaky new ally: Behind the 1 percent’s brazen new scheme to raise your taxes — and cut their own

Reality-challenged report tries to justify tax cuts for the rich, again. Here are the many places where it's wrong

Paul Rosenberg

You might think that tax cuts that pay for themselves had disappeared from rational discourse ages ago. If so, you’d be sadly mistaken. Instead, “rationality” has been redefined to make such tax cuts “true by definition,” at least in one economic model that’s playing an influential role in state-level politics. As gridlock in Washington intensifies, and midterm campaigning focuses attention on statewide races for senator and governor, a new report paints a damning picture of a free market economic model that’s been used to push failed conservative economic policies — especially on taxes — at the statewide level all across the nation.

By now, everyone’s heard of ALEC, the organization that helps push such policies in all 50 states, but the Beacon Hill Institute, a free-market think tank located at Suffolk University, is ALEC’s much less well-known co-conspirator, and its State Tax Analysis Modeling Program is no better known than any other economic modeling program. (Quick, name three of them!) But STAMP has come in for some fairly withering criticism over the years, and now the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has integrated that criticism with its own analysis to produce a devastatingly critical report on STAMP’s biases and failings.