Did cutting taxes and paying off the national debt cause the Great Depression?

[Bono]

Yes, if you want to put it very pointedly, the Great Depression was caused by cutting taxes and paying off the national debt - by doing so at the expense of your trading partners.
The Depression was in full swing well before the Stock Market Crash - farm incomes were declining, in real terms, all through the 1920s, and America was still a very agrarian country in 1920.
In fact, I believe Stock Market Bubbles are a crisis symptom. People won't invest like mad in stocks they hardly know anything about if there are sounder investment options nearer at hand.

Stock market bubbles are a symptom of artificially inflating the money supply.
http://www.mackinac.org/article.asp?ID=4026

[Bono]

I think he is referring to high top tax rates. Taxes weren't all that high in 1930, were they?

Hoover raised the top braket tax to 63% I think.

[Bono]

Paying off the National Debt certainly didn't cause it. Cutting taxes almost continually helped, but I would never say it was the only cause. It was a group of things, not just one thing. It was far more complicated than cutting and raising taxes.

All markets were generally bad. Coolidge paid no attention to farmers who couldn't afford to raise crops, or industry workers who couldn't afford to keep the family going. When the European market collapsed (Mostly because of WWI debts) the US suddenly lost its form of income through exportation and importation. Coolidge was a provincial man in outlook, and a simple man, and a lucky man. He was out just before our market collapsed, leaving Hoover with little warning, and little chance of political survival.

The US lost the european market due to retaliations on Smooth-Hawley, not because of any european market crash. That is a myth propagated by leftists.