MoneyWatch: Financial news, world finance and market news, your money, product recalls updated daily - CBS News The fact is tax cuts are irrelevant to businesses deciding to add or drop employees. . Job creation graphs show a jagged line clearly dropping. I know any jag upward you will declare as proof that it was the tax cuts that caused them, But, the trend is down down down, and the overall impact of the tax cuts is less jobs. Jobs from the tax cut start to now has been on a ski slope down. That would indicate the cuts had a negative impact on jobs. It also was sunsetted because the repubs knew how big an imp-act it would have on the deficit. they wanted it to get a lot bigger, but even they knew it could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. It requires narrow minded Libertarian types to applaud tax cuts at all costs. The world is a little more complicated than Sarah Palinesque sound bites.
Here’s what happened after the Reagan Tax Cut (ERTA) and then what happened after Reagan instituted the biggest-ever tax increase in peacetime history (TEFRA).
I’m sure you have an explanation for this. You can easily look up the Bush unemployment numbers and explain them too. I’d be interested to hear your explanation.
The Bush administration created about three million jobs (net) over its eight years, a fraction of the 23 million jobs created under President Bill Clinton’s administration and only slightly better than President **George H.W. Bush **did in his four years in office. Here’s a look at job creation under each president since the **Labor Department **started keeping payroll records in 1939. The counts are based on total payrolls between the start of the month the president took office (using the final payroll count for the end of the prior December) and his final December in office.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/01/09/bush-on-jobs-the-worst-track-record-on-record/
FOR the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/business/economy/08charts.html
Cite. Bush also inherited the recession caused by 9/11 and the collapse of the dot com bubble. Clinton did not.
It will be interesting to see what rationalizations the left will come up with when Obama has been in office as long as Reagan. Both Presidents encountered the worst recessions since the Great Depression. By the end of his terms, Reagan had presided over the creation of 19 million new jobs, average annual job growth of 2.1% and average annual GDP growth of 4.1% (cite).
Of course, Reagan increased the deficit quite a bit as well - it was 6% of GDP at its worst. This is certainly a Bad Thing.
Not as bad as 10%, which would be almost criminally stupid and irresponsible.
Regards,
Shodan
We are debating getting rid of the tax cuts for the wealthy that kept growing the deficit. It was a Bush gift that just kept on giving. Some people are stupid enough to think it should be continued. The TARP was another treat the Bush team left for us. It was his program after all. And he wanted Paulson to be king of the financial world with even the government unable to touch him. He also donated an unpaid for drug bill that has been eating our treasury since. Toss in the loss of 750,000 jobs a month when Obama took over and you have some legacy there. Thanks a lot Bush. Of course tax breaks to off shore American jobs was another gift. He shoved us over a cliff and Obama tried to keep us from hitting the ground.
Tax cuts for the wealthy were only a small fraction of the Bush tax cuts. The majority went to the poor and middle classes.
Sorry to interrupt your nonsensical left-wing rant with some facts, but here are tax receipts (center column is constant 2005 dollars)
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200
Look at the center column. We can cherry-pick starting years and ending years, to account for the recession (or not). Let’s take 2001 to 2007 as a pair of bookends. That way we still get some of the dot-com boom on the front end, and the tail end of the boom on the back end. I could make my argument look better by picking different points, but those will suffice for now.
Those points show that tax receipts increased by about 10% in constant dollars over that time period.
So the Bush tax cuts did not plunge the country into some kind of fiscal morass on the revenue side. Federal revenue actually went up AND the populace got to keep more of their money, to boot.
Horrible. Absolutely horrible. The humanity of it all.
You need to compare that with how much the population increased before that data is meaningful. Plus, while not directly related to gonzomax’s statement, I believe we have had consensus here that Bush not only cut taxes, but also increased spending. We had a budget surplus when he took office, remember?
Actually the tax cuts, the drug bill and 2 wars without financing did the trick. The tax cuts were focused on the wealthy . It was not a boon to all people. That silly mantra of people getting to keep more of their own money, the flit from macro to micro economics is dishonest.
The impact of the Bush regime has surely been a blow to our country. But some wealthy guy in the Hamptons got a big tax break. I guess that balances out for you.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12685507&postcount=32
And the Bush tax cuts, especially couple with his pro-growth business-friendly policies, did plunge the country into a fiscal morass. The next prez inherited a one trillion plus deficit.
Cite.
Agreed on both counts.
I don’t know how much the population increased, but let’s call it 10% for shits and grins. That means tax receipts per person were flat in real dollars, whilst the population kept more of their money.
So the tax cuts would be net wealth-generative, since the take by the gubmint was the same and the populace kept more.
Tax cuts did not cause a revenue problem. Taxes are used to generate revenue. The deficit is a combination of revenue and spending, as I’m sure you know.
Don’t disagree that they were accompanied by a spending problem. A lot of that is driven by Congress too, of course, which was in the hands of the Democrats by 2006.
And if you are arguing that Bush was a free spender, than Obama is a drop-dead drunken sailor free spender. He’s proposing a full 5%-of-GDP greater spend than Bush.
So to summarize, claiming that somehow the Bush tax cuts drove us into some fiscal morass that Obama is saving us from, is disingenious. Which is what the poster was claiming.
Revenue in real dollars was up overall during the Bush tax cut years, flat on a per-person basis, and the populace kept more of their earnings to boot. If Obama is supposedly ‘saving’ us from that horror by turning on the spending taps to an even greater degree and running up deficits of $1+ trillion as far as the eye can see, I think it’s time to sell someone a bridge in Brooklyn.
According to Politifact, extending the Bush tax cuts for the poor and middle class will cost 850 billion over 10 years. The Obama administration says that allowing the taxes on the rich to expire will raise about 660 billion over the same period, meaning the majority of the cuts benefit the poor.
However, there seems to be wide disparity in these estimates. I’ve seen left wing groups claim that the Bush tax cuts will cost over 2 trillion over 10 years, and estimates from others that the portion of the tax cuts going to the rich is about 400 billion. Because a large part of the cuts to the rich involves capital gains and dividends, estimates are going to vary widely depending on how well you think the economy is going to do.
I will admit that using the phrase ‘small fraction’ was probably understating the revenue of the cuts to the rich. It would be fairer to say that a majority of the cuts favor the poor and middle class in terms of aggregate amount.
No shit.
Published: January 8, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.
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Published: January 8, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.
by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.
Based on an exhaustive analysis of tax records and census data, the study reinforced the sense that while Mr. Bush’s tax cuts reduced rates for people at every income level, they offered the biggest benefits by far to people at the very top — especially the top 1 percent of income earners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html
This analysis offers a comprehensive review of the Bush Administration’s tax cuts. It assesses their costs, benefits to different income groups, and economic effects to date, as well as down the road. It both synthesizes previous findings about the individual tax measures and includes new findings about their combined effects, using new distributional analyses by the UrbanI nstitute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and fresh cost estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The early returns on the effects of the tax cuts have not been good.
[ul]
[li]The Bush tax cuts have contributed to revenues dropping in 2004 to the lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950, and have been a major contributor to the dramatic shift from large projected budget surpluses to projected deficits as far as the eye can see.[/li][li]The tax cuts have conferred the most benefits, by far, on the highest-income households — those least in need of additional resources — at a time when income already is exceptionally concentrated at the top of the income spectrum.[/li][li]The design of these tax cuts was ill-conceived, resulting in significantly less economic stimulus than could have been accomplished for the same budgetary cost. In part because the tax cuts were not as effective as alternative measures would have been, job creation during this recovery has been notably worse than in any other recovery since the end of World War II.[/li][/ul]
Of course, changing the discussion to tax rates as opposed to the overall cost of the tax just obscures the issue. No one disputes that the rich got tax cuts from Bush, or that the rate changes were higher for the rich in absolute terms.
Let’s just stick with your claim that “Tax cuts for the wealthy were only a small fraction of the Bush tax cuts. The majority went to the poor and middle classes.” then :
[FONT=arial, helvetica][FONT=arial, helvetica]By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.
http://www.ctj.org/html/gwb0602.htm
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Why are you looking at 8 year old, before-the-fact estimates? And why are you still focused on the ‘small fraction’ phrase, when I already said it was an overstatement?
Why wouldn’t you use the cost estimates from today, using figures that come from the Obama administration itself?
Here are the Department of Treasury estimates of the costs of extending Bush tax cuts: http://taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=2785&DocTypeID=5. They show that the costs of extending all Bush tax cuts for the next 10 years would be $3.7 trillion. The revenue gain by reinstating the 39.6% income tax bracket would only be $327 billion. The revenue gain by reinstating all tax cuts affecting upper-income taxpayers (including reinstating the 36% bracket) would only be $680 billion, less than 20% of the total cost. Therefore, Dick Dastardly and his outdated liberal blogs are wrong.