Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich is banking on a package of tax cuts to revive Ohio’s moribund economy. “Ohio’s high tax burden is hurting families, strangling businesses and stunting our ability to create jobs and revive our economy,” he claims.

Kasich’s plan is to entirely eliminate his state’s income and estate taxes, and he freely admits that he has no idea how much his plan is going to cost. “People want to know the details of my plan. I don’t have the revenues,” he said.

Not only will Kasich’s plan more than double Ohio’s budget deficit next year, but if history is any indication, that new budget hole will not by accompanied by any significant job creation. Policy Matters Ohio examined the effect of a 2005 cut in both the personal income tax and some of Ohio’s business taxes, finding that the result was billions of dollars of revenue loss and not very many jobs:

The premise of the tax overhaul was that it would spark Ohio’s economy. This was an unlikely claim to begin with, since taxes are not a key determinant of state economic performance…Sure enough, the tax cuts have not proven to be the magic potion for Ohio’s economy. Key measures of economic performance show the opposite: Ohio’s economy has produced relatively fewer jobs, fewer manufacturing jobs, less overall output and lower personal income growth than the country as a whole since the tax overhaul was approved in June 2005. Ohio’s share of the nation’s jobs has shrunk since then from 4.06 percent to 3.87 percent.

Plus, “Ohio’s real per capita Gross State Product stagnated when U.S. real per capita GDP rose.”

The tax cuts were not responsible for Ohio’s economic decline but, much like the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 at the federal level, they did not usher in the era of strong economic growth that their proponents suggested they would. This makes sense, as at the national level, job growth was stronger following President Clinton’s tax increase of 1993 than after either President Bush’s or President Reagan’s tax cuts.

So if history is any indication, Kasich’s job plan will be a dud, and simply bury Ohio in even more red ink, at which point Kasich will likely say that he has to cut services in order to balance the budget.

Former President George W. Bush, after keeping a mostly low-profile since leaving office, “is about to step into the public arena again” ahead of the release of his memoir, which is scheduled to be published the week after the November midterm elections. The book will reportedly include discussions of Bush’s economic decision-making, including his views on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that bear his name and the 2008 bailout of the financial system.

Bush pushed back the publication of the memoir, so that it wouldn’t impair the GOP’s performance in the midterm elections. But lately, some Republicans have been looking back on the Bush years with some nostalgia. “I think a lot of people are looking back with a little more — with more fondness on President Bush’s administration,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

And according to one of Bush’s cabinet secretaries, the memoir will give the public a chance for “serious debate” over whether Bush’s economic policies helped push the country into an economic meltdown:

Former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, a close family friend, said the publicity would give the public a chance to reassess Mr. Bush’s record. “Did we head into a tough period in the last six months in office? Sure,” Mr. Evans said. “Was it a result of policies in his administration? I think there will be serious debate about that. We’ll be debating about it a long time.”

Calling it a “tough period” is underselling how bad the Great Recession was (and still is) for millions of Americans. And Bush’s policies most certainly contributed to the collapse.

Remember, it was the Bush administration that ignored “remarkably prescient warnings” regarding problems in the housing market, while actively pulling strings out of the regulatory framework and appointing regulators fundamentally disinterested in reining in Wall Street. The Bush administration actually “backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages,” even though consumer advocates were ringing alarm bells.

Financial firms thus ran wild, buildings up a huge amount of systemic risk that eventually toppled the system, putting more than 8 million Americans out of work.

But even before the financial crisis, the economy under Bush wasn’t doing well. Bush’s policies “fostered the weakest jobs and income growth in more than six decades,” along with “sluggish business investment and weak gross domestic product growth.” Poverty (including child poverty) increased under his watch, erasing some of the significant gains made by the Clinton administration, and of course, Bush turned record surpluses into record deficits.

Bush’s tax cuts also exacerbated already high income inequality, and there is new research showing that such inequality can actually increase the likelihood of a financial meltdown. So while there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to culpability for the economic freefall, “serious debate” can’t erase the role that Bush and his economic team played.

This week, Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate candidate, has experienced a bit of selective amnesia regarding his often full-throated support for privatizing Social Security. However, on the campaign trail Wednesday he was not at all coy about his support for deregulating derivatives on Wall Street, the very instruments that helped bring down the financial system.

In 2000, former Sen. Phil “mental recession” Gramm (R-TX) attached the Commodity Futures Modernization Act to an unrelated, 11,000 appropriations bill which was passed “on a Friday evening two days after the Supreme Court handed down its Bush v. Gore ruling and as Congress was rushing home for Christmas.” The bill ensured that the growing market in over-the-counter derivatives, including credit default swaps, stayed entirely unregulated, against the advice of people like former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born (who accurately predicted the havoc derivatives would cause).

Toomey — then a member of the House of Representatives — voted for that bill, and said that he would do it again, as “that bill did absolutely nothing to cause the financial crisis”:

“That bill did absolutely nothing to cause the financial crisis, and no credible person has tried to make that argument,” Toomey said…Asked whether he’d vote for it again, he said: “Yes. I think all 377 (House members) would vote for it again.”

Of course, plenty of credible people — including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz — have pointed to the destruction wrought by the lack of derivatives oversight. By keeping regulators away from the OTC derivatives market — which is several times the size of the entire U.S. economy — the Commodity Futures Modernization Act set the stage for the financial crisis and huge government bailouts of 2008, particularly that of the insurance giant/hedge fund American International Group, as David Min and I explained:

Lehman Brothers Inc. and insurance giant American International Group’s inability to honor their many billions of dollars in credit default swap derivative obligations caused investors to question the value of the many financial instruments tied to credit default swaps, causing a classic run on the bank situation for the unregulated parts of the financial system. It was this run on the so-called “shadow banking system” — which performs the functions of banking but outside the regulatory safeguards in place for banks — that led to the bailout of AIG.

Because of the bill that Toomey backed, this huge market grew and grew entirely out of the view of regulators, and was so opaque that even the financial institutions involved in it were unclear as to what was going on.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that was signed into law this year brings the derivatives market out of the dark and sets up a mechanism for ensuring that financial firms trading derivatives have adequate collateral backing them up. So would Toomey advocate that we dismantle these common sense safeguards?