Blame the Bush tax cuts for creating the tax-free class

Blame the Bush tax cuts for creating the tax-free class

Peter Ferrara at Forbes, Why America Is Going To Miss The Bush Tax Cuts, examines the propaganda perpetrated for a decade by the media and Democrats about the Bush tax cuts:

Because so many major media institutions, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, have been so duplicitous and dishonest in discussing the Bush tax cuts, most Americans don’t know much about them, even though they have been living with them for 10 years or more now. Indeed, most of what they think they know is not true….

President Bush and his Congressional Republican majorities at the time cut taxes for everyone in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Indeed, they cut more for lower and middle income taxpayers than they did for “the rich,” as Obama calls the nation’s job creators, investors, and successful small businesses. The top tax rate was cut by only 13%, while the lowest rate was cut by one-third, 33%.

According to official IRS data, the top 1% of income earners paid $84 billion more in federal income taxes in 2007 than in 2000 before the Bush tax cuts were passed, 23% more. The share of total federal income taxes paid by the top 1% rose from 37% in 2000, before the Bush tax cuts, to 40% in 2007, after the tax cuts.

In contrast, the bottom half of income earners paid $6 billion less in federal income taxes in 2007 than in 2000, a decline of 16%. The share of federal income taxes paid by the bottom 50% declined from 3.9% in 2000 to 2.9% in 2007.

The Bush tax cuts also included a doubling of the child tax credit from $500 per child to $1,000 per child. Because of that, and the 33% cut in the bottom tax rate, nearly 8 million more people dropped off the federal income tax rolls entirely, paying zero federal income taxes. Indeed, under the Bush tax cuts, the bottom 40% of all income earners not only paid no federal income taxes, as a group on net. By 2009, they were being paid cash by the IRS equal to 10% of all federal income taxes.

These Bush tax cuts did not explode the deficit, as Obama and his echo chamber have alleged. By 2007, the deficit was down to $160 billion, less than 15% of Obama’s deficits today. Total federal revenues soared from $793.7 billion in 2003, when the last of the Bush tax cuts were enacted, to $1.16 trillion in 2007, a 47% increase. Capital gains revenues had doubled by 2005, despite the 25% capital gains rate cut adopted in 2003. Federal revenues rose to 18.5% of GDP by 2007, above the long term, postwar, historical average over the prior 60 years. CBO was projecting surpluses to return indefinitely in 2012 through the end of its projection period in 2018.

Ferrara then runs through the tremendous job growth after the Bush tax cuts, and concludes (emphasis mine):

Of course, the Bush tax cut boom was ended by the 2008 financial crisis. But as discussed in many previous columns, that was caused by the excessive overregulation of President Clinton’s home ownership promotion policies, creating the subprime mortgage market and the housing bubble, and by President Bush’s cheap dollar monetary policies. Obama’s foolish argument that the Bush tax cuts caused the 2008-2009 recession is so dishonest that abusive propaganda alone should disqualify him from office.

I blame Bush. 

For creating a situation in which at least 40% of wage earners pay no federal income tax (with some actually receiving subsidies), which allows propagandists like Obama to demagogue the top 2% risk free. 

Because federal income taxes are non-existent for a large percentage of the population, requiring even a small federal income tax payment, one miniscule by historical standards, is portrayed as an attack on “the middle class.”  The implicit marginal rate on such wage earners creates, as I once predicted, the threat of a permanent Democratic majority for whom normal rational economics — like earning more money to get ahead in life — does not apply.

I’m all for low taxation for everyone, but we have created a destructive situation where those to whom most of the services go pay the least.  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  Who woulda thunk we have the Bush tax cuts, as much as anything, to blame for that.

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