'Steady decline of middle class'
If he had followed history over the last three decades, it would be obvious that not taxing the rich does not work. While America has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, less than one in four corporations pay a dime in taxes. This is self-destructive for the vast majority of American businesses.
Taxes pay for roads and highways used by businesses to deliver their products to the marketplace. Taxes pay for public education that supplies an educated workforce to provide labor for businesses to develop, manufacture, improve, market and sell their products. Taxes provide police and fire protection to protect the factories, vehicles and sales distribution points necessary to business success. Obviously, no business wants government until their building catches fire and they start looking for the fire truck!
Since 1980, when Reagan began the process of reducing taxes on the superrich, we have seen a steady rise of unemployment, ballooning of the national debt, loss of family wage jobs, rise in health care costs, rising national poverty rates and bankruptcies and a decline in public education effectiveness. Oh, let’s not forget that Reagan, with the help of a little-known economist named Alan Greenspan, was the first to begin robbing the Social Security trust fund to help hide his out-of-control deficits.
During this time we have seen the steady decline of the middle class and its buying power. Since we are a consumer economy, where 2/3 of our economy is driven by consumer spending, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what is going wrong in today’s economy.
Rick Brunton
Beloit
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My reply - let's see if I get published:
Wow - this is getting interesting. I recently replied to George Ferriter about raising federal taxes, and now Rick Brunton has joined in.
I think if Mr. Brunton does a little research, he will find that President Reagan and Alan Greenspan were not the guys who changed the accounting for the Social Security trust fund. This was done by an earlier administration - Lyndon Johnson in 1968 - cited by the federal Social Security Administration. http://www.ssa.gov/history/InternetMyths2.html
What began in 1984 under Reagan was taxation of Social Security benefits.
I agree - some taxation is necessary to run the Constitutionally-authorized functions of the federal government. However, when the federal government continually votes to increase spending on programs that they have no Constitutional authority to create, these taxes start to degrade, rather than enhance, our country's financial health.
If some large firms escape paying taxes, would not the proper response be to modify the tax code to close the loopholes they are using, rather than increase taxes on everyone?
Furthermore, it is shown that the top 10% of US taxpayers pay over 70% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 90% pay 30%. The bottom 50% of US taxpayers pay just under 3%. http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
The steady decline of the middle class and loss of jobs graphed with the increase of federal rules and spending makes an interesting inverse relationship. Government spending never created one job that did not cost the "rich" a lot more than that job created in a healthy economy would have.
We need to rein in big government.
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