how to bridge the divide

This is true although I don't like clean water, fresh air and safe food to be lumped in as liberal entitlements.

Both groups have different things that they feel entitled to, but both the liberal mindset and the conservative mindset have a spectrum of entitlement.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.

I love how this ALWAYS applies to a conservative think tank but NEVER to the worldwide scientific community.

Satan wins again!

The Long Answer:

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/30/452905475/fact-check-do-tax-cuts-grow-the-economy

Tax cuts can boost economic growth. But the operative word there is "can." It's by no means an automatic or perfect relationship.
We know, we know. No one likes a fact check with a non-firm answer. So let's dig further into this idea.

There's a simple logic behind the idea that cutting taxes boosts growth: Cutting taxes gives people more money to spend as they like, which can boost economic growth.

Many — but by no means all— economists believe there's a relationship between cuts and growth. In a 2012 survey of top economists, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that 35 percent thought cutting taxes would boost economic growth. A roughly equal share, 35 percent, were uncertain. Only 8 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed.
But in practice, it's not always clear that tax cuts themselves automatically boost the economy, according to a recent study.

"It is by no means obvious, on an ex ante basis, that tax rate cuts will ultimately lead to a larger economy," as the Brookings Institution's William Gale and Andrew Samwick wrote in a 2014 paper. Well-designed tax policy can increase growth, they wrote, but to do so, tax cuts have to come alongside spending cuts.

And even then, it can't just be any spending cuts — it has to be cuts to "unproductive" spending.

"I want to be clear — one can write down models where taxes generate big effects," Gale told NPR. But models are not the real world, he added. "The empirical evidence is quite different from the modeling results, and the empirical evidence is much weaker."

It's not just Gale. According to a 2012 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (referenced by the New York Times' David Leonhardt in a 2012 column), top marginal tax rates and economic growth have not appeared correlated over the past 60 years.

One other nuance — it depends on the type of tax cut. You can imagine how cutting taxes for lower earners might boost activity more than cutting the top marginal rate — lower-income Americans with an extra $100 are more likely to spend that money than a millionaire.

Likewise, the economic research firm Moody's found in 2008 that temporary tax cuts (like rebates) could boost GDP, but permanent ones had a much weaker effect. Meanwhile, boosting spending on programs like food stamps and unemployment had a stronger effect, they found.

In short, if your sole, ultimate goal is faster growth, tax cuts might not be the best policy.

Why It Matters, Part 1: What do these plans cost?

This might seem like a stupid question — of course economic growth matters! — but it matters doubly for these tax plans because it affects how much they end up costing. And most of the Republicans' plans look really, really expensive.

A lot of the conversation about revenue in this week's debate focused on estimates from the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning tax policy think tank in Washington, D.C., that has scored many of the GOP candidates' tax plans.
That group releases what are called static and dynamic scores. Dynamic scores are complicated: They take into account potential economic effects — for example, they assume that tax cuts can generate economic growth and therefore, revenue. Static scores are much simpler, ignoring those effects.
And that's a weakness of static scores — policies have effects. But dynamic scores involve the impossible task of predicting the future. A perfect dynamic score would be the best option, but no one knows how to do a perfect dynamic score. So dynamic scores are inherently uncertain as well, and there are a lot of ways to get them wrong.

To see this fight in action, look back to earlier this year, when the Congressional Budget Office, with a new GOP-appointed director, announced it would start issuing dynamic scores.

Or look at the Tax Foundation. Many (Gale included) say the group's dynamic scores are too generous, making policies like tax cuts look cheaper than they really are.

And here's where the bottom line comes in — even if you do believe the Tax Foundation's dynamic scores are way too generous, as of earlier this month, they found that one candidate (Rand Paul) comes out with a plan that won't slash revenue, while most of the other candidates will cut it by more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Trump's plan, by this math, cuts revenue by $10 trillion over 10 years.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both cut taxes deeply on the promise of economic payoffs, putting aside concerns about deficits, which grew during their tenures. Mr. Trump at points during the campaign talked tough about deficits, promising not only to eliminate them but also to wipe out in just eight years the entire $19 trillion in national debt that has accumulated over the history of the United States — a pledge so wildly unrealistic that even he has since dropped it.

While a corporate tax rate cut of the dimension Mr. Trump envisions would reduce tax revenues by more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years, Mr. Mnuchin noted that an increase in economic growth of a little more than one percentage point would generate close to the same amount. The goal, he said, was to produce a sustained national growth rate of 3 percent, instead of the 1.8 percent now projected over the next decade. That would not include the cost of personal income tax cuts.

The question comes down to how the effect of a tax cut is measured. Under what is called static scoring, changes are judged without assuming any difference in growth. Under what is called dynamic scoring, assumptions are made about how much growth will change. “Under dynamic scoring, this will pay for itself,” Mr. Mnuchin said at a public forum last weekend. “Under static scoring, there will be short-term issues.”
Critics scoffed at the math. “There is not a shred of evidence to support the secretary’s pay-for-itself claim,” said Jared Bernstein, a top White House economics adviser under Mr. Obama. “Sure, significantly faster growth would spin off more revenues. But there’s simply no empirical linkage between tax cuts and growth that’s both a lot faster and sustained.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group focused on reducing deficits, said that Mr. Trump’s tax plan was more likely to increase growth by 0.2 percentage points than by the higher estimates Mr. Mnuchin forecast. “These tax cuts, of course, would not pay for themselves,” the group said in a statement. “As we’ve explained before, there is little evidence to suggest any major tax cut could pay for itself with economic growth alone.”

I'm for reducing tax rates to zero. According to how you think you understand your charts, it would not change anything.

Looking at those charts,
it shows average marginal income tax rate being 40% or higher
ever since 1978.
Please advise.