This makes my stomach churn. The idea that lower taxes fuels the economy is as contagious and false as religious ideas, and propogated by the self-same idiots. It's also disgusting that after decades of lobbying, there are enough loopholes to allow the richest of the rich to almost altogether avoid taxes. Yet they control the media. Therefore the zeitgeist. Enter their champion phrase "class warfare". If you wonder why the middle class is evaporating and the rich continue amassing more wealth, perhaps it's because we've been hoodwinked into swallowing this nonsense.
http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/P ... HAS-89LPZ9?
The hard, empirical facts:
The tax cuts did not spur investment. Job growth in the George W. Bush years was one-seventh that of the Clinton years. Nixon and Ford did better than Bush on jobs. Wages fell during the last administration. Average incomes fell. The number of Americans in poverty, as officially measured, hit a 16-year high last year of 43.6 million, though a National Academy of Sciences study says that the real poverty figure is closer to 51 million. Food banks are swamped. Foreclosure signs are everywhere. Americans and their governments are drowning in debt. And at the nexus of tax and healthcare, Republican ideas perpetuate a cruel and immoral system that rations healthcare -- while consuming every sixth dollar in the economy and making businesses, especially small businesses, less efficient and less profitable.
This is economic madness. It is policy divorced from empirical evidence. It is insanity because the policies are illusory and delusional. The evidence is in, and it shows beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts failed to achieve the promised goals.
So why in the world is anyone giving any credence to the insistence by Republican leaders that tax cuts, more tax cuts, and deeper tax cuts are the remedy to our economic woes? Why are they not laughingstocks? It is one thing for Fox News to treat these policies as successful, but what of the rest of what Sarah Palin calls with some justification the "lamestream media," who treat these policies as worthy ideas?
The Republican leadership is like the doctors who believed bleeding cured the sick. When physicians bled George Washington, he got worse, so they increased the treatment until they bled him to death. Our government, the basis of our freedoms, is spewing red ink, and the Republican solution is to spill ever more.
Those who ignore evidence and pledge blind faith in policy based on ideological fantasy are little different from the clerics who made Galileo Galilei confess that the sun revolves around the earth. The Capitol Hill and media Republicans differ only in not threatening death to those who deny their dogma.
How much more evidence do we need that we made terrible and costly mistakes in 2001 and 2003?
Figure 1. High-Income Paying Zero Tax 1998-2008
The number of individual income tax returns showing adjusted gross income of $200,000 or more, but no income tax liability, has been rising rapidly in recent years.
Table 4. 2008: Fewer Jobs, Lower Pay
(With Exceptions in Bold)
Comments (15)
Warren Buffett, billionaire, pays a total tax rate (federal, state & local) of
0.2% of his income and investment gains. A typical single person earning a
minimum wage pays taxes amounting to 22% of her wages, a 100-fold higher rate
than Mr. Buffett’s.
The top 1% in the US have gone from owning 22% to 40% of the nation's wealth in
the last thirty years. This is largely due to the tax cuts for the wealthy
investor class, started under Reagan, continued under Bush. They were supposed
to encourage investment and strengthen the economy. Since then, the average
annual GDP growth dropped by one-quarter.
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