I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of these deals come from constrained government budgets rather than corruption. The conservative movement has been very effective at keeping taxes and government revenue low since the 1980s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W006RC1A027NBEA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B245RC1Q027SBEA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/S210400
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W070RU1Q027NBEA
If budgets are constrained, it's because spending has simply risen faster than tax revenue.
(Never mind the deep-rooted federal corruption that has destroyed steady returns from debt and thus caused all of this dumb money to be scraping for returns via home run equity investment)
[0] which requires pushing back against growing middle management bureaucracy, which consumes resources while providing no services.
Which has predictably resulted in basic services being cut and things that even the hardest ultra-hardcore libertarian wants government to do -- like providing police and courts to enforce contracts and property rights -- having to resort to overpolicing in order to collect money from citations, since that's the only revenue stream the "10 CUT TAXES; 20 GOTO 10" mentality will allow.
Given the idea that a 100% tax rate would result in near zero zero economic activity (nobody would have money to spend and nobody willingly works for free,) that result in near zero tax revenues. If we accept that a 100% tax rate would result in near-zero tax revenues and if we accept that a zero tax rate would also result in zero revenues, then it follows that there IS a point where revenue and growth are optimized and that point isn't necessarily close to 100% or zero. Many non-conservatives who dispute Laffer would be happy with a 75% tax rate, as their Keynesian (or alternatively, Marxist) belief is more plausible that the reality depicted by Laffer.
However most people, Democrat and Republican, do believe in Laffer -- they just dispute where those revenue and growth maximizing points actually occur. The problem is that many Democrats don't care about Laffer (even though they do agree with the effects of the curve) -- they willingly chose to ignore Laffer because their convictions of economic "justice" supersede the rationality of Laffer. Meaning they know Laffer is correct, but they don't care: they'll sacrifice maximum revenue and maximum growth for maximum "fairness." Ironically, maximum "fairness" results in lower overall tax revenues this starving the very programs they insist are necessary. Then they blame conservatives because clearly x% is too low of a tax rate because "deficits."
Belgium has a much higher tax rate (43% for a single person making the average salary) and New Zealand is about 16%.)
The growth rate of Belgium is 1% and New Zealand is 3.5%. There are definitely more factors involved, but there is absolutely a correlation between growth, tax revenues and tax rates (a correlation illustrated by Laffer.)
My point is that keeping tax rates low os not necessarily the same thing as keeping revenues low. We could argue the opposite with equal ferocity: non-conservatives have kept government revenues low by keeping tax rates high.
To be honest though, conservatives do favor the left side of Laffer, even at the expense of revenues because the growth maximizing point is to the left of the revenue maximizing point. The non-conservatives favor the right side of the curve (closer to the revenue maximizing point) even at the expense of growth.
I could only wish our tax policy were based purely on math rather than politics. Voters decide what growth rate they want, we enter that into the system and the tax rate is dynamically calculated. The tax rate would then be a result of economic reality rather than the cause. The political debate would then "simply" be: how much growth do we want? Unfortunatly tax policy is used to reward or punish those whose politics are on the 'correct' side of the winning political party.