Even Conservative Economists Think Pawlenty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty grabbed headlines this week with an ambitious, detailed policy address, the first of the 2012 Republican presidential contest. He pushed for huge corporate and income tax cuts and elimination of capital gains taxes, among other things. Bloggers and policy analysts were quick to argue he would starve the government of tax revenue and explode the deficit, and that the 5% annual GDP growth he called for was historically unprecedented.

Their complaints were joined today by Josh Barro at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, who expressed disappointment at such an unrealistic and orthodox proposal, one that fails to account for the government’s red ink and that aspires to bring about the kind of growth produced by the national industrial policy of the United States during the 1940s, and no time else in our history. [City Journal, via Ben Smith]