They All Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano

As a marketer, I spend a lot of time looking for successful ideas to promote things. One of the most successful advertising campaigns ever used the headline above to promote a piano teaching program. It was brilliant, funny, and it worked.

I thought of that line last night when I read that the Treasury Departemnt expects tax revenues for 2005 to be 14% higher than 2004! Now you probably haven't seen that piece of good news highlighted on the TV or in your local paper. But that's an astonishingly good result. In fact, it's the highest tax revenue increase since the early 1980s...

...when, by a not-so-strange coincidence, we had another major round of tax cuts pushed through by another conservative President. (For the bi-partisan types, the same thing happened in the early sixties when a very non-Republican guy named Kennedy pushed through tax cuts.)

If you're like me, you've heard all the moaning about the unwise tax cuts and how they would deprive the government of the money it needs. Well, in the first place, not having money has never stopped them from spending it before, which is how we got to a national debt of almost 8 trillion dollars! But in the second place, it's not true. Tax cuts bring in more revenue, because they promote economic growth and development.

They all laughed when George Bush sat down at the tax cut keyboard, but (to borrow a line from the Gershwins) "who's got the last laugh now?"