Danny Finkelstein is fighting a proxy battle for his friend George Osborne, that is why advocates of tax cuts like of Fraser Nelson, Tim Montgomerie, Iain Dale, Dominic Lawson, Nick Clegg and Guido are so willing to battle with him on the blogs and rehearse the arguments.

What is so depressing about Danny’s arguments is that they are primarily about politics rather than economics. They are not even about politics with a capital “P”, but the low politics of electoral calculation.

He has even taken on Arthur Laffer. Danny doesn’t believe there is anything to gain from promising voters tax and spending cuts. Even though strong political leadership could make the case to the voters more credible. It is because of an unwillingness to tackle the issue head-on that the Tories have allowed the vocabulary of the argument to be determined by Brown. How come we never hear much of Gordon’s unfunded spending commitments – the budget deficit? In all of this the actual merits of the case for a low-tax, higher growth economy have been ignored.

Laffer’s new book The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let It Happen reminds us that there is more to the argument than just psephology. If we want to get out of this recession faster we need to lighten the tax burden on business and consumers…