By the way, here is the cite to support my discussion about after-tax real income gains for various income groups.
I just ran the numbers to compare the different tax plans. I used the following websites for the marginal tax rates from 2012 and 2000:
http://taxes.about.com/od/Federal-Income-Taxes/qt/Tax-Rates-For-The-2012-Tax-Year.htm
I calculated the tax burden for a single person making $14650, $55950, $205950, and $1005950 under the Clinton Era tax rates, Bush Era tax rates, and then the top rate under Obama’s proposed roll-back. I chose those numbers to test a person in the lowest bracket of the Bush rates, someone making $50000 taxable income, $200000 taxable income, and $1000000 taxable income after the standard deduction. A flaw in my methodology is that a person in the 2 higher brackets will not use the standard deduction, but by my calculations, the more deductions they take, the lower the marginal tax rate, but also the lower percentage change of their tax burden.
A person making $14650 would pay $1537.50 under the Clinton rates, and $870 under the Bush plan. Thats a 43.5% reduction in actual tax burden.
A person making $55950 (or $50000 taxable income) pays $10587.5 under the Clinton plan, and $8530 under the Bush plan a reduction of 19.4%
A person making $205950 (or $200,000 taxable income) pays $60051 under the Clinton plan, and $50528 under the Bush plan, a reduction of 15.9%
A person making $1005950 (or $1000000 taxable income) pays $373670.4 under the Clinton Plan, $326761 under the Bush plan, and $364147 under the Obama plan. The Bush plan gives a reduction of 12.6%, and the Obama plan allows them to keep 20.3% of their Bush cut.
I sincerely ask someone from the other side to check my numbers, to see if I made any mistakes. Viewing my numbers as is, I can only draw 1 conclusion. The Bush tax cuts were enormously skewed to give poor people a bigger cut (in keeping with the Keynsein principle that more stimulus money in the hands of the poor creates a higher multiplier).
As a libertarian, I believe in the broadest possible application of the equal protection principle. I believe that any law which specifically singles out any group as not having the law apply to them is unconstitutional, whether that group is minorities, women, gays, rich people, fat people, or blue people. If you pass a tax cut, you cut it for all. If you pass a tax increase, you increase it for all.
No, the Democrats are taking away tax cuts that are already written in law for those people, and only those people.
Since you’ve proven to be a fountain of misinformation, I decided to go back and fact-check your first post again and noticed yet another error: No, the “very rich who make very little in salary, and most of their money from capital gains” did not see “no benefits”. In the 2003 legislation, “the capital gains tax decreased from rates of 8%, 10%, and 20% to 5% and 15%” (except for property held less than one year, which would be taxed at regular income tax rates). This means that the very rich (let’s call them “The Romneys”) would presumably have seen their income tax rate drop from about 20% to about 15% if they got most of their money from capital gains on property held for less than 1 year. That is about a 25% reduction in their taxes…a very far cry from “no benefits”!
(1) It is written into a law that expires. So, the Democrats are simply not renewing those particular tax cuts for people who sure as all hell don’t need them!
(2) This is a far cry from your now-debunked claim that “The Republicans want to extend tax cuts to everyone, the Dems want to extend them to everyone except singles with over $200k taxable income and couples with over $250k taxable income”, which implied that they would get no tax cuts under the Democratic extension when they are in fact getting tax cuts that, in absolute dollar amount, are larger than all lower income groups.
I retract that statement. Would it be more fair to say that under President Obama’s plan, everyone’s taxes will remain the same except for those making over $200-$250k, depending on marital status? If you accept this statement as true, the question asked by the OP would still be invalid. The OP asked what effect cutting taxes on the rich would have. To me, this implies that the OP has bought into the “Republicans want tax cuts for the rich” myth. The Republicans want nothing of the sort. They want to extend tax cuts that are currently on the books, while the Democrats want to extend most of them, but in a way that the rich, and only the rich, pay more taxes. I have already said that my objection is that any law which only changes things for one group violates equal protection. On a more human note, all it does is increase inter-group strife. If we need tax increases, than increase all of our taxes. We are all Americans, and have a stake in this. The only reason why the Democrats want this is because it is favorable to their constituents, and unfavorable to the other party. Is this what American politics is about? Lets stick it to the (insert group here). Whether that group is “The Rich” as the Democrats do or “the foreignors” as the Republicans say, it doesn’t matter. A party should not cherry pick its economic policy to cater to its constituents.
The rich are not being unjustly targeted. A change in the top marginal tax rate is applied evenly and fairly to every single American in exactly the same fashion.
(1) The OP was asking this as a general question since it has been the general policy of the Republicans to cut taxes in a way that a huge proportion of the cuts go to the top 1% of income earners.
(2) The OP asked, “What real, historical evidence there is to support the Romney/Ryan plan (assertion?) that cutting taxes on the rich leads to job creation and economic growth?” And, the OP has characterized this plan correctly. If you look at what Romney has actually proposed, it goes well beyond just extending the Bush tax cuts. For example, Romney wants to cut the tax bracket rates with the highest dropping from 35% to 28%, he wants to fully repeal the alternative minimum tax, and many other things.
Well, at least this statement has the advantage of not being outright false, like many of your statements, since it is a matter of opinion and not fact. It is, however, a rather bizarre opinion. Is being “rich” some sort of protected class? We have a long history of taxing people based on their income that involves lots of values-based decisions. Why is making some change to that a violation of “equal protection”? Why was it not a violation of equal protection when Bush cut taxes in a way that gave somewhere upwards of 1/3 of the money to the top 1%?
No, what is increasing inter-group strife is when, despite the fact that you say we all “have a stake in this”, in fact most of the gains made over the last 30 years or so have gone to the group that is already doing well, while the middle class and poor have seen much more modest gains. That increasingly means that the economy is working well for a privileged few and not so well for the rest of us.
No, the reason why the Democrats want to do this is because they don’t subscribe to the underlying driver of Republican policies, which appears to be, “Inequality is not increasing fast enough!” The Democrats are actually quite beholden to the rich for much of their campaign dollars, so the rich are not being thrown under the bus by Democrats. Rather, the 99% are being thrown under the bus by Republicans because the Republicans are utterly and completely beholden to the top 1%. What the Republicans have found is that they can cater completely to that group in their economic policies and still earn the votes of a large segment of the 99% by cynical division of that 99% with racially-based appeals as well as pitting the Middle Class against the poor and by making a big deal out of social “wedge” issues like abortion and gay marriage.
And yet that is what the Republicans have been doing for the last several decades. Hell, it’s not even like the rich didn’t do fabulously well under Clinton too. Even while having to pay higher tax rates, the rich vastly increased their after-tax income under Clinton. As Buffett has so aptly explained it, the actual class war that has been occurring over the last decades is the extremely rich like him vs everyone else and his class is winning.