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Public to Lawmakers: End Tax Cuts for the Rich
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A majority of the American public thinks Bush’s tax cuts should continue for families that make less than $250,000 a year but should rise to the previous level for those making more than that amount, according to a new CNN poll. Some 51 percent say the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, should end for the rich.
Wise. Because as Dave Dayen points out, George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are thought to cost $830 billion over 10 years, adding massively to the nation’s budget deficit. Overall,
it’s generally considered that extending all the tax cuts would increase the deficit by $3.1 trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is among those calling for an end to Bush’s tax cut for the rich, noting it has been a “huge windfall for the wealthy. About 40 percent of its benefits went to the tiny sliver of Americans earning over $500,000.”
A final reason for allowing the Bush tax cut to expire for people at the top is the most basic of all. Although Wall Street’s excesses were the proximate cause of the Great Recession, its fundamental cause lay in the nation’s widening inequality. For many years, most of the gains of economic growth in America have been going to the top—leaving the nation’s vast middle class with a shrinking portion of total income. (In the 1970s, the top 1 percent received 8 to 9 percent of total income, but thereafter income concentrated so rapidly that by 2007 the top received 23.5 percent of the total.)
The only way most Americans could continue to buy most of what they produced was by borrowing. But now that the debt bubble has burst—as it inevitably would—the underlying problem has reemerged.
Extending the tax cuts for the rich would exacerbate the already massive income gap between the rich and the rest of us, and so, to end with Reich:
Why make it worse?
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28 Comments
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Who creates jobs? The poor do not. I am poor and cannot create any jobs. It seems to me that the people who have money create jobs. By taxing them is there no incentive to create jobs. Like Donald Trump says if they punish me I will sit and do nothing.
I have heard this line of thinking, but we should know for sure if it’s true.
Have the tax cuts to the wealthiest created jobs from their specific wealth or is it a ruse to keep us in favor of not eliminating them?
Those who possess money do not need “incentives” to create jobs- hiring workers and selling the products they produce is the only way that they can “make” money. This may be done by loaning their money to a bank, by loaning it to a corporation through the stock market, by loaning it to the government through buying bonds, or by direct investment.
In periods of crisis, they tend to become very conservative- settling for living off their riches and not making any money for a while. This is where the role of government as a “job creator” comes in. By spreading out the risk of the needed reinvestment (and by freeing up more money to those who must spend it on the things they need to live)- the government is able to soften the impact of the kind of devastating crises that existed before WWII.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when the sheer greed of the rich has blinded them to the entire progress of US governmental policy over the past 80 years. They have spent exorbitant amounts of money to fund thinly-veiled propaganda efforts around why they should not have to give even a small proportion of their money to the government- for their own good as much as anyone else’s.
While these anti-tax policies might be good for the rich on an individual level, they spell disaster for society when implemented broadly, and the Trump quote is nothing more than an attempt at blackmail.
Please, Brother, study this issue carefully and with all the attention it deserves. You will find out that these lies are a dangerous poison.
Regards,
Sam
followingsylvis.blogspot.com | twitter.com/followingsylvis | http://www.facebook.com/followingsylvis
With all due respect, your comment is naive. Sure, our giant corporations create jobs — in India, Pakistan, Mexico…
For decades, our govt has been providing billions of dollars of corporate “tax relief” every year, supposedly to be used to create “good, family-supporting jobs.” What have corps done with this money? Let’s see, we have unprecedented CEO bonuses, and sinking wages for workers. US workers see worsening working conditions, unions have largely been wiped out, and hundreds of thousands of our jobs continue to be exported. Do you think that if the govt doubled its current levels of corporate welfare, they might keep a few more of our jobs in the US? No, for the wealthiest, too much is never quite enough. It’s time to cut them off.
Lot’s of jobs were created by tax cuts, for the people of 3rd world countries. Aside from that the fast food and retail industry has really grown here in the U.S.A. so we always have McDonald’s to turn to for a job. LOL! Unfortunately, those living wage jobs are more and more overseas sweatshop operations. The jobs left for us are low end service jobs selling the sweatshop goods to each other.
Mr. Trump isn’t threatening to do anything new at all. He is threatening to do what he has done most of his life. NOTHING! Let’s get a bunch of free money on speculation and buy up more stuff. Hell, I can do that too Donald. I may be poor but the credit card offers still keep coming my way. See you in debtors prison Big Guy, but don’t drop that soap. Hahahaha!
Income for the top 2 % has almost tripled in the last 30 years and the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy have been in effect for the last 10 years and have wreaked havoc on this country by eliminating 3 trillion dollars from the U.S Treasury over that time frame.NO JOBS CREATED—MORE OUTSOURCING OF TAX EXPOSURE—–OF JOBS—-and now here we sit in a depressed economy as a direct result!!Do not come to this forum and defend the Wealthy who have never suffered and have never sacrificed a fuckin dime for this country but have gotten stinking rich from the 24/7 scam on Wall Street and the Military-Pharmaceutical-Healthcare-Prison Industrial Complex and a Fuckin Justice System that always comes to their aid and benefit!!
http://youareproperty.blogspot.com/2010/06/tax-rich-corporations-and-you-people.html
According to the chairman of Harvard Dept of Economics, the poor pay an additional 22% in the form of higher prices to cover the federal tax cost component + compliance costs incurred by businesses operating in the USA (no wonder we can’t export anything). Yes the rich pay it too, but this hurts the poor MUCH more than the rich.
This is true no matter how you tax individuals.
The rich don’t spend any more than they already want to, jobs are created by demand, not tax cuts.
Look back to the 1950s, though, more and more loopholes for the rich were built into the tax code, so much so that JFK observed in his second debate with Richard Nixon that dropping the top tax rate to 70% but tightening up the loopholes would actually be a tax increase.
JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age.
http://laborcartoonzone.blogspot.com/
You don’t raise taxes in a middle of a recession!
The federal reserve has called for the tax cuts to continue. Economists state that ending the tax cuts would turn a recession into a depression.
One proposal is to require over 50% of the tax cuts to benefit those making less than $250,000.00 per year. That way, the benefits would be to everyone.
Were you not told to never swear ! My ole (buddy) Don Trump, would sell his own mother for the right price ,never has he ever had a scrupple or ever will have one! How many good paying jobs did he sell off for another dollar in his pocket, he is one of the reasons that you are still poor, per say… do you really think the wealthy are suffering ? Get real!
Its not tax cuts or physcal or even monetary policy that will create good union jobs. The industrial unions must fight for high tariffs on imported goods. Every dime of Union money that goes to a candidate that votes for “free” trade places another nail in the coffin of the workers’ movement.
Its not tax cuts for rich Republicans that destroy unions. It is politicians like, yes, Clinton and Obama who advocate “free” trade. They export jobs and import immigrants. The labor force grows and the available jobs decrease. A large labor supply and fewer jobs means lower wages.
Remember Samuel Gompers and George Meany were not politically correct, but they would never have been defrauded by a Democrat Party that takes contributions from workers and ships their jobs overseas.
It is not the Tea Party that needs a new party. It is the industrial workers who need a new conservative party that fights for workers, not globalization and international trade.
Who creates jobs? The poor do not. I am poor and cannot create any jobs. It seems to me that the people who have money create jobs.
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Some of us have noticed that an awful lot of the rich are NOT creating good jobs:
**Daddy Bush and the Carlyle Group, peddling weapons all over the globe, increasing the killing and mayhem, and, no doubt, arming future “enemies” who will be using them to kill and maim our GI’s.
**The Walton family, owners of Walmart–they are the richest family on the planet, but pay poverty-level wages, don’t provide health insurance, and are constantly violating our labor laws.
**Neil Bush and the rest of the bandits who ripped off the nation savings and loans and left the rest of us dumb taxpayers to pay $500 billion to clean up the mess.
**The many CEOs who ship good American jobs to overseas sweatshops, then give themselves such obscene compensation packages that even our business magazines scream, “Oink!”
**The wizards at Merrill Lynch who lost $29 billion of their customers money, but still took home multimillion dollar bonuses—paid for with taxpayer-funded bailout money.
The list goes on and on: the Halliburton execs getting rich off their no-bid, no perform contracts; the insurance barons at AIG; the Enron boys; the mortgage bankers…. A lot of these people belong in jail, but since that’s not going to happen anytime soon, the least we can do is make them pay their fair share of the taxes.
The government can save money by cutting spending. I have a few ideas what to cut. Start with Education department and next the energy department. You save billions of dollars. The states can handle education and private business can handle energy. Screw the government who does nothing but spend money on wars and bridges to no where.
Even tax cuts for those making between $150,000 and $250,000 is an absurdity. If a person makes the latter, it only takes four years (that’s right–4 years) for that person to make a million dollars. Who of us ever could aspire to that really in a lifetime to say nothing of four years.
Americans are lacking in basic facts about how the wealth of this country has disproportionately gone to the wealthy since the Reagan administration (and this includes the Clinton admininstration in there, too).
The information that we see showing the top two to five percent controling 90% and better of the wealth seems to go over the heads of the average American.
If G.I. Joe knew that he was fighting for that in WWII, he’d be mighty unhappy today. The halcyon days following WWII are gone. America is bleeding at its heart and not one wealthy individaul cares. If middle class America cared, it’d get out to the polls and keep Democrats in office and give them the tools (more Congressional members) to make filibusters, etc., impossible.
“Corporate tax relief” means that the taxes owed by rich corporations are passed along to the public. We pay so they don’t have to. A big chunk of these “savings” have been used to ship our jobs to foreign countries.
After some 30 years of massive annual corporate “tax relief,” always doled out on the theory that it would result in job creation, we have fewer — not more — jobs.
No more corp tax relief. Restore the free enterprise system, letting businesses thrive or fail on their own merits. If angry corps then flee the country, so? There are plenty of people waiting in the wings, eager to rebuild American business.
It seems that the superrich, whose wealth has tripled since Reagan, could afford to give up a little money to the US Govenment, which has done so much for the superrich, and so little for you and I. The rich will use every means at their disposal, (and they own all of those means) to convince us that they are indispensable and we can not do anything for ourselves. Apparently, some of us are unable to think on our own, and need the rich to tell us how to think. The fact is, that throughout history, all of the advances for working people, such as building the unions, ending Jim Crow segregation, or ending the horrific War in Vietnam, – every victory we have won has been through our own independent mobilization, while the rich did nothing except make the victory as hard fought as possible.
The vast majority of the wealth of the superrich was inherited, and the rest was more or less stolen, legally and illegally. But the rich man makes sure that his kids know how to protect that wealth before he passes it on to his cretinous offspring. They know their math, or like George W., know how to hire advisors who know math, and simple math says that, since the Supreme Court legalized the outright purchase of elections, it is a very good investment to spend $10,000,000 putting their lackeys in office if they can get them out of paying $100,000,000 in taxes. None of this will ever change until we build our own Labor party and give up on the Democrats, who are nothing more than Republicans who know how to pretend that they are concerned about the common people.
Obama is a failure because he has not been able to even attempt the only solution available to us at this time, a massive investment in public works and infrastructure which could put millions back to meaningful, necessary work at union jobs paying union wages. The rich claim we can not afford this, but it would cost less than the endless, useless, vicious war in Afghanistan and the occupations of Iraq and Korea. They never turn down war spending because it is too expensive, only whatever you and I (and the country) need.
Ultimately, the next massive battles to mark American history, and the world’s, will be between the workers and the bosses. Either we need the superrich, and need them to be as rich as possible, because we can not do anything ourselves, or we do not need them at all, which is the obvious fact. In that case, we must simply confiscate all of their ill-gotten superwealth. Those that cooperate can be given a stipend for their families of, say $500,000/year, and those that resist must be broken and arrested. Then we can rebuild a rational, fair and environmentally sound society without racism and war. Either the rich are superior to us, and we are chattel, or they are equal to us, and we must make them equal to us politically and financially. They are the only real ‘special interest’ group, and, right now, they are in total dictatorial control, even controlling the minds of some of our confused union members.
Also, if you were watching NBC’s Meet the Press with David Gregory the past few weeks, you would see that the Republican leaders are not even able to answer simple questions regarding their obviously contradictive calls to lower the deficit while simultaneously calling for the extension of the Bush tax cuts.
The Republicans themselves have admitted (also on Meet the Press) that they have a credibility problem when it comes to this issue. The unemployed are Repulican, Democrat and Independent. Make them understand that their constituents (voters) are paying attention to what they are and are not doing on this matter.
the afl cio is asking its members support to end the tax cuts for the rich, what about the 3% tax encrease for working americanms when tey go , did any one see how when this tax credit ends what the encrease is for working americans ! it means more fed tax on us , can any one in the afl cio explain how this is going to work , what it means is that the democrats failed in creating jobs and the wild spending spree that could not creat any jobs , but a haven for the ones that created the bad economy got all this money there sitting on and we have no jobs and all the illegals and foreign born workers got jobs from these programs , along with acorn getting 8.7 trillion over 6 years , union members got nothing ! with bush we got jobs with obama we get high taxes !
How many jobs did the Bush tax cuts create? Where are they? Extending the cuts will only perpetuate the same old same old. Time for main street to get some help.
It’s a good thing that the first comment came from a “poor man.” He repeats what we have been fed for a generation about job creation.
The truth is that corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion in cash that they can’t invest because we, the consuming class, do not have the earnings to purchase the fruits of their investments.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/07/corporate-americas-pile-o-cash/#more-57389
No tax cuts will get them to create jobs for people making stuff that can not be sold.
Letting the Bush cuts for the rich run out is an important first step. The next steps are along the lines of what William Rayson suggests above.
A few of the wealthiest, Buffett and Bill Gates, have said they would not mind paying more taxes. Not all of the wealthy create jobs. We need to close the gap between those making over $250,00 yearly and the middle class persons making far less than that.
Give them their tax breaks… if they create quality domestic jobs at living wages. Otherwise tax anything imported.
Well,well,well. The party of “NO” can say, “YES”. Now, if only for the average person.
About 100 years ago Henry Ford realized you cannot have a sustained industrial economy if the people who make goods don’t have enough money to buy them.
The tax cuts made by the deficit-spending Bush and the Republicans did NOT create jobs. These cuts added over one TRILLION dollars to the deficit which President Obama inherited. Unemployment also increased under Bush. Bush policies also brought us to the brink of total financial collapse and the big financial bailout by the Bush administration. Now the Republicans are screaming that any “aid” for the unemployed or for healtcare for the other 98% of us must be paid for. But when it comes to tax cuts for the rich the Republicans don’t mention how they will pay for them. I suspect they will make the rest of us pay for them by raising our taxes. Republicans want your vote so they can continue to shift the wealth to the few and eradicate the middle claass.
Consider this, as a poor person (I prefer working class) as a bloc we contribute more jobs to the economy. For example, If I am an irresponsible low-income consumer that abuses credit cards, over spends and doesn’t pay bills here are some of the millions of jobs I help create, cashiers, retail stock persons, OTR truck drivers, sanitation workers, construction workers, salespersons, managers, customer service agents, credit processors, debt collectors and the list goes on. . . can Wall Street top that.
Unfortunately what we have in the USA is socialism for the rich .Obama is not going to do anything .he said change we can believe in but that is such a vacuous statement He put summers and geithner as his pointmen to aid in the economy but that was the equivalent of having the foxes guard the chicken coop
It is SO disappointing that Obama and Co. didn’t make repeal of the Bush tax cuts their #1 priority. How about a wealth tax? America desperately needs to get money out of the hands of billionaires and into the hands of the rest of us.