Speaker John Boehner says the "threat of higher taxes" is contributing to unemployment. This is nonsense. Higher taxes don't correlate with high unemployment. If it did, the 1950's and 1990's would have been periods of economic disaster. The highest tax rate during the Eisenhower administration was 91%, yet the 1950's were a time of unprecedented prosperity.
Clinton modestly raised taxes on the wealthy in the 1990's. The opposition rent their garments and predicted impending disaster. Instead, we saw the longest period of sustained prosperity, and low unemployment, in the history of the United States.
The opposition may actually believe that lowering taxes prompts the wealthy to lay awake at night thinking how they can put that largesse to work generating jobs. That, however, is not what happens in the real world.
Lower taxes lowers revenues which lowers the number of public sector jobs, thus increasing unemployment. Secondly, rich people sock their windfalls away in places where it generates money for them (and pays no taxes).
This is "shock doctrine" all over again. Use an economic crisis to promote an agenda that shrinks government, thereby whittling down the government's ability to regulate the private sector. Everything is "privatized" which means stiffing the poor and shifting even more power to the oligarchs.
One can see why the rich and powerful would support such a program. What beggers the imagination is why anybody else would.
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