As the presidential campaign heads into its final three weeks, Republican John McCain plans to stress anew tax cuts as a way to fight the sluggish economy that has threatened global credit markets and hampered his candidacy.
Campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds declined to say whether the Republican nominee would make any new economic proposals during an event today in Virginia Beach. McCain ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Sunday that McCain is looking at ways to “jump-start” the economy with tax cuts to encourage investment.
McCain’s economic plan already proposes a cut of the corporate tax rate and making permanent the Bush tax cuts that are scheduled to expire in 2010.
Where will corporate tax cuts help Main Street? We have had all these cuts for GW’s days and we are losing jobs. Please someone in the know explain it. Or is it just an idle promise trying to help resurrect a quickly failing campaign?
Thirty years ago, extremely high rates of taxation on extremely high incomes may actually have discouraged business growth to some small degree. Enter Reaganomics. What began as an effort to help industrialists retain more than a few percent of their own pre-deduction non-loophole income devolved into a sweeping agenda with the twin goals of facilitating the growth of vast personal fortunes and reducing the size of the federal government.
“Government is part of the problem,” was a popular sentiment, but also a profound way of missing the point. Again and again those politicians failed to actually do anything other than balloon the national debt. Yet again and again, they slashed taxes on Americans already farthest removed from real economic distress. What began as a way to make government less of a nuisance in the lives of influential titans wound up rendering government profoundly dysfunctional while completely backfiring in the realm of fiscal conservation.
Barring some small part of Ronald Reagan’s first wave of tax cuts, the United States has never had a broadly applied tax heavy enough to significantly impede business growth. When today’s Republican leaders claim that tax cuts will create growth, they combine the initial failure of that unwarranted ideological conviction with the profound dishonesty (or idiocy) required to overlook the real relationship — the real history and the real data, both here and around the world — that holds taxation within normal ranges has minimal impact on overall economic growth.
In other words, it isn’t so much an idle promise as a dirty trick. However, that kind of sleaze is at least an attempt to clash on the plane of ideas. As such, it deserves praise by virtue of its merit relative to other messages coming out of Senator McCain’s campaign.
Thanx for the visit demonweed….good post….a lot of good info for people to consider….if the cash spent on war were being spent in the US…there would be no need to even consider this one way or the other.
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Does Raising Taxes on The Rich Create Jobs? Yes, it does.
The Will of The People
Hi Will and thanx for the visit and the comment…..While I agree with you completely…the ones we have to convince are the low information people that buy into the crap spread by others, i.e. FOX News
The quotation is LUST for money is the root of all evil – however, that’s the point – most rich people NEVER have enough money because having the money is only a barometer of their success to them – the REAL lust they have is MAKING the money in the first place and if they can make more abroad than at home, that’s where they go.
Some of the owners of the biggest businesses in the world (no doubt some in the US) were once Brits who were taxed to the hilt in the 70s-80s, so they upped and left – it could just as well work the other way round.
I only wish it didn’t work that way, but it does and, these days, the world (particularly the business world) has moved WAY beyond individual countries like the little old US…
So what you suggest is true – possibly but only to a limited extent if the taxes are pitched at exactly the right level. Of course, what most of the rich actually do is to look for a more astute lawyer and accountant to offset the taxes for them – and most certainly NOT by reinvesting in the company – even possibly by employing less people to do the same work with maybe better machines or just working the employees harder.