I So Love Numbers
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pops the Bush "tax cut" hot air balloon. I don't know who these guys are, but at first blush, their numbers look a lot like my own do. They've got somewhat different inflation-adjusted income figures over time, but their time scale is different from mine.
Bottom line is this: The Bush tax cuts are doing exactly what they were designed to do: Benefit the political donor class (to borrow a descriptive phrase from David Cay Johnson). Nobody seriously believed that tax cuts for the wealthy would create jobs; twenty years of recent history means we know that's just bullshit.
This whole tax policy debate bears astonishing similarity to arguments about smoking and health. Sure, we know now that it's bad, and you were a dope to ever think that it was good for you. But in the seventies and eighties the jury was out as far as health effects went...the tobacco profiteers maintained their public ignorance about the health effects and went to extremes to ensure that the debate stayed confusing.
Today's "conservative" is reduced, in his pro-tax cut rhetoric, to vague protestations of "it's just wrong to tax", or "the rich people will leave, and we'll all be in trouble".
One of the ideas behind democracy is that if we all vote in our self-interest, what comes out of the sum of that is policy that benefits to most people. What is utterly mysterious to me is how many otherwise decent and smart people vote for a party whose fiscal policies amount to stabbing that voter in the back.
Our cultural clash with Radical Islam has taught us a great deal about a spectrum with politics on one end and religion on the other. If we presume that facts were ever available to support a position, knocking away those facts one by one results in a shift to the religious end of that spectrum, if one continues to support those positions with the same level of fervor...
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Ross,
Ross,
Little people will ALWAYS be fucked, whomever you vote for. Whether I vote Bush or Kerry...um, rather whether I vote Bush or don't vote at all will change my bottom line not at all. My quality of life will still be entirely determined by my net income, which will be a fraction of what I earned regardless of whose name is on the White House mailbox.
So however sensible your evidence and conclusions, they won't sway me. I'm going to keep working this full time job and whatever consulting work and freelance writing I can scrounge to get ahead.
Yeah, "tax cuts for the rich"
Yeah, "tax cuts for the rich" are SO evil, aren't they? I mean, just because they pay the overwhelming majority of the taxes paid, and just because they create almost all jobs created in one way or another, and, and, and... I HATE THE RICH! TAX! TAX THEM!
If there's anything that those past tax cuts prove, it's that they tend to work. They often increase revenues(look up the Laffer curve), and while that will only work for a while, I don't think that while has run out yet, taxes are still too high. And yes, you tax too much and the rich people will leave(they'd be insane not to), and yes it's wrong to tax excessively. You seemed to state those points with a sarcastic sneer, but you shouldn't.
And "the political donor class" is BS - yes, the rich donate bigger figures, but not to the extent that you'd think. I know that the mean Republican donation is $50, and while I don't know the Dem number, I'd figure it's similar. Doesn't exactly sound like a millionaire's cheque to me.