(FORTUNE Magazine) – The U.S. being a free country, numerous folks are offering George Bush advice on tax policy. Some of the advisers (including 24 Republicans in the U.S. Senate) are telling George to keep moving his lips against taxes; others (including FORTUNE) have called for tax increases of various sizes. But here's the funny part. Give or take a few eccentrics, nobody is standing out there saying let's go back to the pre-Reagan system of steep progressive taxes. William James, the psychologist, philosopher, and father of pragmatism, once said that triumphant ideas tend to pass through three stages. In the first stage, they get hooted down as ridiculous beyond belief. In the second, they are widely accepted but often disparaged as obvious and insignificant. In the third stage, they are acknowledged to be important and some of the hooters are starting to act as if it was their own idea all along. (James himself was thinking about the acceptance of pragmatist philosophy around the turn of the century.) We claim that the long argument about supply-side economics has been moving along some such trajectory. One of the supply-siders' critical thoughts is that steeply progressive taxes inhibit economic activity. Quite a few characters who continue to hoot at supply-side economics have lovingly embraced that thought. It was first launched at a time when the U.S. individual tax code had a marginal tax rate that topped out at 50%. A small band of determined supply- siders -- Jack Kemp, Jude Wanniski, and Arthur Laffer being the best known -- argued that the rate was far too high. Loudly deriding this doctrine were a lot of folks who thought it looked low; it had, after all, been 70% when Reagan came into office, and 90% earlier in the postwar years. So the 1984 Democratic platform proposed to raise the top rate, and candidate Walter Mondale unwisely never wavered on that point. As recently as 1985, the Washington Post was still griping about the 1981 reduction in marginal rates (to a maximum of 50%) because it had made the system less progressive and therefore less equitable. This was the standard liberal view. Joe Pechman, every liberal's favorite authority on taxes, was being endlessly quoted on the justice of progressive taxation. House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski hewed to the same line, as did Republican Bob Packwood, the newly crowned chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. (''I sort of like the tax code just the way it is,'' was Bob's first thought on being anointed.) How long ago it all now seems! Everyone agrees that if Dukakis had miraculously won the election in November, he would almost certainly have called for a tax increase -- but not for an increase in marginal rates. (Like virtually everyone else favoring tax increases, he seemed to be gravitating toward some kind of consumption tax.) After half a century in which Washington viewed steep progressive taxes as the obviously equitable way to go, you suddenly have trouble finding a politician or local newspaper demanding their return. On to Phase III.