If you're at all anything like me, then nothing sets your teeth to itching like the mindless repetition of a Frank Luntz talking point. Not only is the man himself an inartful jackass, whose machinations are only effective on mouthbreathing paleo-conservatives and corporatists, but his clients don't even have the shame to hide his fingerprints when his lies are called out in high profile fashion. The fact that the Luntzes of the world are damaging the discourse and harming this nation -- and the rest of the world -- well, what of it?
But the lie that keeps on keeping on, despite ample evidence of its truthiness, is one that every American knows by heart: We can't raise taxes on job creators. This is the meme that's dominated the
In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that not only does raising taxes not kill jobs, but cutting them actually hurts economic growth. I don't want to be accused of a post hoc fallacy, so I won't read too much into Mike Kimel's analysis, but at the least we can say that cutting taxes doesn't generally stimulate growth as we've been told so many times.
So we know that cutting taxes on rich people doesn't stimulate growth, but that's not even the point of the meme. "You can't raise taxes on job creators or the economy will, I don't know, do something bad," say national Republican figures, and a whole slice of America says, "Yeah, I guess that makes sense." Well, I guess, then, we need to look for an instance when taxes were raised only on those job creators, and maybe we'll see what "something bad" will happen to us. Is there such a beasty?
Well, yeah. During President Bill Clinton's first term, he began pushing to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Congressional Republicans went apeshit and began reflexively saying the stupid shit that Republicans say when they're apoplectic. They called it the "Kevorkian Plan," they said it would kill jobs, and they campaigned on it and ousted Democratic majorities in the House and Senate by convincing idiot America of their sincerity. Sound familiar?
So what happened after Clinton assisted our economy's suicide? Well, apparently, zombie economy was more fun, anyways. Unemployment shrank, and continued to shrink, dropping 40 percent, from 7.6 to 4, between 1993 and 2000. We balanced the budget for the first time since 1969, and had a massive stimulus for Republicans to fuck up and fritter away. Again, I won't confuse correllation with causation, but I will note that what Republicans were promising in 1993, what Republicans are promising today, well, that never happened. Raising taxes on rich people doesn't hurt the economy and it doesn't put the working man on the breadline. It. Just. Doesn't.
Chart below the fold.
This chart takes the top marginal tax rate and juxtaposes it with BLS numbers for annual average national unemployment. While there are corresponding drops in unemployment when taxes were lowered, it must be noted that taxes were lowered across the board, and therefore not only put money in the pockets of "job creators," but also boosted aggregate demand all the way to the bottom of the income scale.
1. Tax Policy Center
2. Burea of Labor Statistics