Text 20104, 124 rader
Skriven 2006-05-17 08:17:00 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av ALAN HESS
Ärende: tax cuts don't pay
==========================
-=> ALAN HESS wrote to ALL <=-

Oh my!  Get ready for a shitstorm from the neotards & pathetriots, Alan. 

 AH> By Sebastian Mallaby
 AH> Monday, May 15, 2006; A17

 AH> Nobody serious believes that tax cuts pay for themselves,
 AH> as I noted last week. But most senior Republicans flunk
 AH> this test of seriousness.

 AH> In January, George W. Bush declared that, "by cutting the
 AH> taxes on the American people, this economy is strong, and
 AH> the overall tax revenues have hit at record levels."
 AH> Regrettably, this endorsement of what his dad called
 AH> voodoo economics was not a one-time oversight. The next
 AH> month, Bush told a New Hampshire audience, "You cut taxes
 AH> and the tax revenues increase."

 AH> Bush is not alone in this. Dick Cheney, allegedly a
 AH> serious person, asserted in February that the "tax cuts
 AH> have translated into higher federal revenues."

 AH> Bill Frist is sometimes taken seriously, not least by
 AH> himself. And yet the Republican Senate leader is capable
 AH> of saying: "Many people in Washington have long known a
 AH> dirty little secret about tax-cut measures: When done
 AH> right, they actually result in more money for the
 AH> government."

 AH> Chuck Grassley chairs the Senate Finance Committee and
 AH> ought to know about this stuff. But he mouths the
 AH> following nonsense: "There is a mindset in both branches
 AH> of government that if you reduce taxes you have a net
 AH> loss, if you increase taxes you have a net gain, and
 AH> history does not show that relationship."

 AH> And just last week Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) celebrated
 AH> the extension of the Bush tax cuts by saying, "We've put
 AH> these tax provisions in place and they've raised money."

 AH> Okay, so let's review this issue with the help of some
 AH> experts. I'd like to cite Richard Kogan of the Center on
 AH> Budget and Policy Priorities, because his work inspired
 AH> this column. But to win over reasonable conservatives, I'm
 AH> going to choose N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, a proponent
 AH> of tax cuts who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers
 AH> in the Bush White House. Mankiw is a top-notch economist
 AH> hired by Bush and Cheney to advise them. And last year he
 AH> published a paper on how far tax cuts pay for themselves,
 AH> reporting enthusiastically that this self-financing effect
 AH> is "surprisingly large."

 AH> How large, exactly? Mankiw reckons that over the long run
 AH> (the long run being generous to his argument), cuts on
 AH> capital taxes generate enough extra growth to pay for half
 AH> of the lost revenue. Hello, Mr. President, that means that
 AH> the other half of the lost revenue translates into bigger
 AH> deficits. Mankiw also calculates that the comparable
 AH> figure for cuts in taxes on wages is 17 percent. Yes, Mr.
 AH> President, that means every $1 trillion in tax cuts is
 AH> going to add $830 billion to the national debt.

 AH> Let's engage in what Bush might call the soft bigotry of
 AH> low expectations and cut Republicans some slack. Hey,
 AH> maybe they just overlooked that Mankiw paper? Or maybe,
 AH> despite hiring Mankiw to head the Council of Economic
 AH> Advisers, they later acquired reasons to doubt his
 AH> judgment? In that case they should at least have listened
 AH> to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, another conservative economist who
 AH> worked in the Bush White House and who went on to run the
 AH> Congressional Budget Office.

 AH> In a study published under Holtz-Eakin's direction last
 AH> December, the CBO estimated the extent to which a 10
 AH> percent reduction in personal taxes might pay for itself.
 AH> The conclusions confirm that the free-lunch mantra is just
 AH> plain wrong. On the most optimistic assumptions it could
 AH> muster, the CBO found that tax cuts would stimulate enough
 AH> economic growth to replace 22 percent of lost revenue in
 AH> the first five years and 32 percent in the second five. On
 AH> pessimistic assumptions, the growth effects of tax cuts
 AH> did nothing to offset revenue loss.

 AH> So Mankiw isn't with them. Holtz-Eakin isn't with them.
 AH> Which raises a question: When top Republicans go around
 AH> claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves, which economic
 AH> authorities are they relying on? None, is the answer.
 AH> These people's approach to government is to make economics
 AH> up.

 AH> The Republicans' only argument is that tax receipts have
 AH> boomed in the years since the 2003 tax cut. But the
 AH> question is whether tax receipts increased because the tax
 AH> cuts worked some kind of magic or because the economy was
 AH> headed up anyway after the recession, thanks maybe to low
 AH> interest rates resulting from the Asian savings glut.
 AH> Friends, the reason we have economists is so that they can
 AH> solve these puzzles for us. Ignoring their solutions is
 AH> like ignoring the judgment of medical science in favor of
 AH> faith healers and quacks.

 AH> Politicians are always speechifying about how the United
 AH> States must lead the world in research to maintain its
 AH> edge. But having the world's best economics research isn't
 AH> particularly helpful if those same politicians are silly
 AH> enough to tune it out. The truth is that American business
 AH> excels at turning university research into world-beating
 AH> products; the paranoia on this score is overdone. But
 AH> American government is often lousy at turning research
 AH> into policies. That's what we should fret about.

 AH> smallaby@washpost.com
 AH> + 2006 The Washington Post Company

 
[The conservative wing of the Republican Party, the most corrupt political
movement in the history of the republic who, like the fascist swine of 60 years
ago, are actively working to kill the America of The Founders.]


... The Lickspittle Legion, Der Monkey's dwindling supporters
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