Lots of people are linking to this interview bite, where Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) appears to admit that tax cuts lower revenue. That this is a big moment in Republican politics should really give pause. You have an entire party who believes against all laws of mathematics that lowering the rate at which people pay taxes increases revenue for the government. Their claims that tax cuts pay for themselves in economic growth have been refuted again and again and again, most recently yesterday by Alan Greenspan, a vocal supporter of the Bush tax cuts.

But did Cantor even admit what everyone thinks he did? Here’s the money quote:

“[I]f you have less revenues coming into the federal government, and more expenditures, what does that add up to? Certainly you’re gonna dig the hole deeper. But you also have to understand, if the priority is to get people back to work, is to start growing this economy again, uh, then you don’t wanna make it more expensive for job creators.”

He basically said, “Sure, less revenues theoretically increase the deficit, but we’re about getting people back to work, and low taxes for ‘job creators’ facilitates that.”

So I wouldn’t say he conceded the point so much as he raised a different one, a point which is equally wrong as the Laffer curve, incidentally. He claims that lower and lower taxes facilitates job creation. But the two Bush terms saw the lowest taxes for the wealthy, presumably the “job creators” Cantor is talking about. And those two terms saw the worst job creation in recorded American history going back to the Depression. This chart from the Wall Street Journal lays it out. Nobody since Hoover had worse annual job growth than George W. Bush, at a time when it was not at all expensive for “job creators” to make money.

I agree with Steve Benen that Cantor is conceding that the economy matters more than the deficit, a key bit of info. But if you think that paves the way for a legitimate discussion of these issues you haven’t seen one Washington Republican speak over the past decade.

Meanwhile, I’d rather pigeonhole Republicans along the lines of what Andrew Samwick asks of those still clinging to the idea that tax cuts raise revenue: if that’s the case, where does it end? Where does the Laffer curve bend? At what point do marginal tax rates, in this theory, end up becoming counter-productive and decreasing revenue?

Restated, if these tax cuts raised revenue, then why not keep cutting them until the point at which revenues actually begin to fall? I presume the reason is that none of the proponents of this line of argument have any idea what the revenue-maximizing tax rate is. They only like to assert that we must have been past it because tax revenues eventually went up at some point after the tax rates were cut (ignoring the obvious counterfactual that it was economic growth unrelated to the tax cuts that pushed revenues higher and that they would have been even higher at the higher tax rates).

So the next question is simply, “What do the experts on your staff tell you that the top marginal tax rate should be in order to maximize tax revenues, leaving everything else about the tax code the same?” Journalists should relentlessly ask it of the Republican leadership in Congress who continue to make fallacious claims, and the Democratic leadership in Congress ought to ask it politely in a letter to CBO Director Doug Elmendorf.

I suspect this answer isn’t going to come very quickly.