I think the case is a bit oversold by the right (there were certainly other factors, including monetary policy, which contributed to near-full employment and the end of the recession), but overall, the tax cuts achieved their policy aims.

This recession is very different from others, and should be approached differently. I’m not sure that tax cuts will be as useful as they have been in the past, and cutting spending (though it has had interesting results) will likely not be inherently helpful for alleviating our economic woes, though it should be done regardless. Deregulation would be a moderate help, as well, but not a major one. That said, “moderate success” would be much better than “unmitigated disaster”, as can be said of Stimulus II.

cutting spending and regulation, you might want to take a look at New Zealand since the ’80s, and “Rogernomics”. Essentially, their own conservative revolution stuck and prospered, and led to an actual cutting of government spending and regulation which still continues, albeit at a slower pace than initially. It’s done a great job of making New Zealand quite prosperous, despite leftist caterwauling. (It also helped them get out of a recession, though the circumstances of and reasons for that recession were very different from our current crisis.)

and supply sider, you might be interested in Greg Mankiw and Christina Romer’s respective work on tax cuts and the spending multiplier, two influential modern-day Keynesians with research showing that tax cuts may have higher multipliers than is conventionally imagined by Keynesians. Christina Romer and her husband (both economists) recently co-wrote a paper in which they posit that tax cuts have a multiplier of 3! In other words, for every dollar of tax cuts, the GDP would rise by $3. This is pretty extreme: for comparison’s sake, most research puts the multiplier on government spending as, at most, 2. Here’s the kicker: the Obama economic team (of which she is one of the heavy hitters) posited a multiplier of about 1.5 for government spending: a pretty middle of the road measure for govt. spending among economists. Perhaps her opinion has reversed, but considering that she was going against the grain in a big way in her original paper, I’d say some muzzling was involved. IMO, Obama’s economic team is generally his rubber stamp commission, and some of them are participating in the hope that they can make bad economic bills better on the margins. (I don’t think there are that many Paul Krugmans and Brad DeLongs out there in the econ world.) I’m not sure that this recession can be solved through conventional monetary or Keynesian policy tools (tax cuts, the Fed, and government spending, generally). But if they are, I’d rather have tax cuts: even not-perfect packages like the Bush tax cuts have proven pretty good.

You’re absolutely right, btw: Keynes and economists in general (besides some outliers like Krugman) are opposed to changing the current tax structure for the worse during recessions (though in all fairness, they’re also against nixing government expenditures, though to a lesser extent, as GMU, the U of Chicago, Austrians and monetarists would show). My guess is that ObamaDems are going into this non-renewal with their eyes wide open; i.e., with their economists kicking and screaming for them to renew the Bush tax cuts or otherwise promise no tax hikes. The Democratic Party’s composition, ideology, and interest groups make them unlikely to nix barriers to business entry, remove regulation that costs businesses money, and other supply side helps.

Linky: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_kd_zg&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:USA&tstart=-283996800000&tunit=Y&tlen=47&hl=en&dl=en