Nic_Driver
Active Member
- Mar 25, 2011
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9 Things The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes
1. Poor Americans do pay taxes.
2. The wealthiest Americans dont carry the burden.
3. In fact, the wealthy are paying less taxes.
4. Many of the very richest pay no current income taxes at all.
5. And (surprise!) since Reagan, only the wealthy have gained significant income.
6. When it comes to corporations, the story is much the sameless taxes.
7. Some corporate tax breaks destroy jobs.
8. Republicans like taxes too.
9. Other countries do it better.
The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.
For three decades we have conducted a massive economic experiment, testing a theory known as supply-side economics. The theory goes like this: Lower tax rates will encourage more investment, which in turn will mean more jobs and greater prosperityso much so that tax revenues will go up, despite lower rates. The late Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who wanted to shut down public parks because he considered them socialism, promoted this strategy. Ronald Reagan embraced Friedmans ideas and made them into policy when he was elected president in 1980.
For the past decade, we have doubled down on this theory of supply-side economics with the tax cuts sponsored by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, which President Obama has agreed to continue for two years.
You would think that whether this grand experiment worked would be settled after three decades. You would think the practitioners of the dismal science of economics would look at their demand curves and the data on incomes and taxes and pronounce a verdict, the way Galileo and Copernicus did when they showed that geocentrism was a fantasy because Earth revolves around the sun (known as heliocentrism). But economics is not like that. It is not like physics with its laws and arithmetic with its absolute values.
Tax policy is something the framers left to politics. And in politics, the facts often matter less than who has the biggest bullhorn.
1. Poor Americans do pay taxes.
2. The wealthiest Americans dont carry the burden.
3. In fact, the wealthy are paying less taxes.
4. Many of the very richest pay no current income taxes at all.
5. And (surprise!) since Reagan, only the wealthy have gained significant income.
6. When it comes to corporations, the story is much the sameless taxes.
7. Some corporate tax breaks destroy jobs.
8. Republicans like taxes too.
9. Other countries do it better.
The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.