| Timmah! said: It's kind of tough to say what the Bush tax cuts really cost, and if they actually did cost us anything. Revenue to the government has actually gone up since the tax cuts because the economy improved after the early Bush term recession (which was a combination of cyclical factors, as well as the attacks of 9/11, Bush had not been in office long enough to have caused the first recession). It could be argued that the economy would not has improved as well or as quickly, so revenues would have stayed flat even with higher taxes. Because there's no way to determine what would have happened without the tax cuts, this remains a matter of opinion rather than fact. I believe the tax cuts stimulated the economy, and the increased revenue from a better economy negated the lower tax rate, resulting in no loss to government revenue, this is backed up by the numbers. However, if you believe that the economy would have recovered the same without the tax cuts, it would make sense that they did cost the government money. Either way, it comes down to unproveable opinion. |
I agree to some degree, and I wouldn't be complaining at all if the Bush adminstration were willing to keep its budget within a reasonable margin (first adminstration to break a $1 trillion budget AND $2 trillion budget).
My main concern is the immediate impact those policies had on our country, the ballooning national debt. Obviously if we weren't spending so much we wouldn't need to have high taxes, but when we ARE spending that much, we should have higher taxes.
That is how European countries have done things for centuries, higher taxes when they are at war, lower taxes when they are not.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
