Bingo. This is a very complex issue. I don't think there are any simple answers. Not even this tells the whole story:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1692027,00.html#ixzz1bL0IO0lf
Why, then, does the right keep saying or implying that tax cuts do increase revenues? The short answer is because it depends on what you mean by revenues. If you mean, revenue as % of GDP, the evidence is overwhelming that tax cuts do not increase this; this is what economists, right as well as left, mean when they say tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. What may happen, though—and I think this is what Scott is hanging is hat on—is that tax rate cuts may result in stimulating growth which, given enough time, results in a substantially larger GDP. So much larger that even though revenues are less as a % of GDP, they are greater in absolute terms. But this is more complicated.
Consider a fairly long-term window. In the 1960s marginal tax rates on the wealthy were far higher than they are now, but revenue was greater than it is now (as % of GDP). In fact, there has been a dramatic overall decline in top marginal rates in the past fifty years (mostly because of major cuts by Kennedy, then Reagan), but revenue (again, as % of GDP) has actually changed very little over that entire time period, fluctuating at around 20%.
OTOH, absolute GDP has actually tripled or so during this period, so absolute revenue has also. But how much of this growth was the result of the lower tax rates, and how much the result of other factors? Nobody knows. There is far more to economic growth than the wealthy suddenly agreeing to invest because of tax savings. Some growth is expected just because of population increase, and it does not necessarily follow that is linear—that a 10% increase in population should result in 10% more growth. As population increases, the number of interactions among people may increase by a far larger degree, and this can result in a boom, particularly when certain technology emerges. Much of the growth of the 90s, for example, was driven by developments in high tech. It may have been facilitated by a certain economic climate, but it absolutely required advances in scientific research (much of it funded by the federal government), which came in their own good time.
Consider what came just before the 90s, the Reagan years. Reagan's initial tax cuts resulted in a spike in revenues. But revenue fell off dramatically not long after that. Then Reagan raised taxes, twice, but revenue increased somewhat. At the end of Reagan's two terms, revenue as % of GDP was lower than it was when he took office, but absolute revenue, again, was up, because the economy grew markedly during his eight years.
Most economists, I think, give Reagan’s policies at least some credit for that growth. Again, we really don’t know how much was the result of tax policies and how much the result of other factors. But even assuming his tax policies had a lot to do with the growth, the wealthy benefited far more from that growth than the poor or the middle class. Much of the increase in absolute GDP had no effect at all on the living standards of the middle class (to be fair, some did), and the poorest, I think most people agree, were worse off during that period.
Why were the poor worse off? A large part was due to some of Reagan's policies, but there is another key factor that highlights another problem with the tax cut/growth relationship. As GDP increases in absolute terms, the amount of personal wealth needed just to escape what is considered poverty also increases. A hundred years ago, someone without a refrigerator was not poor. Today, someone without a refrigerator is very poor. This is not just a matter of people today expecting more than people in the past. Society has been transformed to the point where everyone needs certain things to survive that they didn't need in the past. You have to be wealthier, in absolute terms, just to function.
In mixed economies, a major role of the government is to ensure that people keep up in this sense. So government spending will have to increase as GDP increases. Thus revenues as % of GDP--which I emphasize again, declined during the Reagan years, and also during the Bush years--is not something that we can ignore. Absolute GDP does not tell the whole story.
Edit: I might add, when considering Reagan's policies today, that those policies also resulted in an enormous increase in the deficit. That was far more politically acceptable then, obviously, than it is now.
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