The GOP's New Tax Cut Hypocrisy - Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

[JohnWxy]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-27/bush-tax-cuts-and-the-gops-deficit-hypocrisy/?cid=hp:exc

During the Bush years, Republicans mostly insisted, in Dick Cheney’s famous words, that “deficits don’t matter.” Now they say deficits are virtually all that matters. Their rhetoric has shifted radically, but their policy prescriptions haven’t changed one bit. You might think that people terrified of deficits would be concerned about permanently extending tax cuts that will add at least $2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Nope. (my emphasis_JW) The Republicans were for cutting taxes when they didn’t care about deficits and they are for cutting taxes when they do care about deficits, which is another way of saying that they don’t really care about deficits. For their part, most Democrats are as adamantly opposed to upper-bracket tax cuts as they were in the Bush years, even though if you really believe in Keynesian economics, as the Democrats supposedly do, raising taxes during a recession makes a lot less sense than raising them when times are good.

UH, excuse me Peter, but according to Moody's Analytics analysis Unemployment Insurance Benefits give you $1.61 of economic expansion for every dollar disbursed by the Government. But, looking at the Bush tax cuts, for every dollar of tax revenues foregone we only got $.32 worth of economic growth. THat's a LOSS of 68%. NOte that this is for the Bush tax cuts in total which throws in the lower income brackets (like that's most of us) with the higher brackets.

SOOOOOO, recognizing that people making say, under $100,000 a year have a much higher marginal propensity to SPEND any additional after tax money they get than the higher tax bracket people do, we can conclude that the loss of 68% for everybody covered by the Bush tax cuts would be even worse if you only looked at those in the highest tax brackets. Uh-huh, get my drift Mr. Beinart?

In other words, eliminating the loss incurred on the tax cuts to higher income brackets would pay, at least in part, for the tax cuts to those who are going to spend much more of any tax cut they retain. This would give you an even bigger stimulus, on balance, to the economy than continuing the tax cuts for all income brackets.


However, Peter, I do agree with you that, when it comes to being Hypocritical MFers, you can't beat the Republican party!

[LaPera]

1. But republicans certainly say YES to deficit raising tax cuts for the richest 2% as well as...

YES to deficit raising wars for corporate profits (corporations still making billions of dollars off these republican wars) republicans say
YES to deficit raising bailouts to corporations & deregulation, allowing corporations to pollute, cheat, collude with NO oversight!