Ten years ago, the plundering of the nation's wealth got a boost of legislative steroids when George W. Bush signed his tax cuts into law. It was pure insanity, at least if you believe in a country of fairness. But, aside from the economic and social wreckage left by these immoral tax cuts, what did we learn? If you look at the rhetoric coming from our political leaders, very little--which explains a big part of the mess we are in.
Consider the wreckage first, courtesy of Citizens for Tax Justice:
The tax legislation enacted under President George W. Bush from 2001 through 2006 will cost $2.48 trillion over the 2001-2010 period. This includes the revenue loss of $2.11 trillion that results directly from the Bush tax cuts as well as the $379 billion in additional interest payments on the national debt that we must make since the tax cuts were deficit-financed.[emphasis added]
The emphasis added was simply to underscore one piece of the mountain of hypocrisy that we here from the deficit-scare mongers: the added interests payments on the national debt because of the tax cuts.
The beneficiaries, per the tables in the analysis, are overwhelmingly the rich: a third of the tax cuts--over $673 billion--went to the top one percent.
Rightly so, CTJ is focused on the future. Because there are a whole host of elected members of Congress who want to extend the tax cuts beyond 2012. The effect, per CTJ:
Fiscally irresponsible: Many lawmakers want to extend the Bush tax cuts again into 2013 and beyond, which would almost double the federal budget deficit.
Unfair: The table below shows that 47.2 percent of the benefits of this tax cut extension would go to the richest five percent of the nation’s taxpayers.
Hypocritical: Many of the same lawmakers insist that the budget deficit forces them to cut or eliminate public services like Medicare and Medicaid.
CTJ has this map that breaks down who would get the money state-by-state if the tax cuts were extended.
In my state of New York, the poorest 60 percent would get an average tax cut of $457.
The richest one percent would get a tax cut of $116,249.
And, so, the robbery would continue.
Tax cuts and the mess we are in.
We seem to learn very little. Or, perhaps, it's better to say that our elected representatives seem to learn very little--partly, albeit, because of the corruption of the electoral process that seems to force even those who have half a brain to automatically spew out the words "tax cuts" along with "economic recovery", "government regulations" and "small business" as if there was even a connection between any of those phrases to building a health economy.
Example: in 2009, the president proposed, and the Congress passed, a stimulus bill that was supposed to drag the economy out of the crisis sparked by the financial crimes on Wall Street. The problem: the stimulus was too small--$787 billion--and a third of the bill was...tax cuts!!! The most inefficient way to create jobs. And, IMHO, it's the reasons the stimulus did not have the impact it could have had (a point I argued with a conservative on CNBC last week).
So, now, the president and Democrats are caught in a real pickle: they face a disastrous jobs picture but they seem reluctant to push for new government stimulus because they feel on the defensive defending the 2009 "failed" stimulus. Well, that's what you get for believing in tax cuts as some economic miracle-producer ("failed" is in quotes because actually if you ask governors and mayors about the stimulus you would find a lot of them grateful for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were saved thanks to the stimulus).
And we don't learn.
People run around wanting to cut taxes for "small businesses" and eliminate the estate tax--even though this is just a cover that, "would allow the rich to continue to enjoy most of the tax cuts they received under President Bush while doing nothing to create or protect jobs."
The "compromise" tax deal in 2010 tilted to the wealthy.
Then, there is the truly dumb idea of giving corporations yet another tax break by letting them bring back profits stashed overseas virtually for free.
And wrapped around all this craziness is the entire phony debate about a debt and deficit "crisis"--phony because the only crisis that exists is the lack of jobs in the country, a crisis brought on by a massive robbery of our nation's wealth, in large part, due to the obsession over giving ever-larger tax cuts to people who do not deserve to get them (and a decision by many of those same people to pay themselves obscene CEO salaries).
It goes on and on and on. A robbery that has gone on for thirty years shows no sign of abating.