A Small Price For Jobs
Rx For Recovery: A new study from the Democratic Congress claims that keeping the Bush tax cuts is too expensive. What's too costly, though, is the economic price of adding to the tax burden of job creators.
Congress' revenue estimate shop boasts the lofty title of Joint Committee on Taxation, but a better name would be the Static Statisticians Association. The JCT on Wednesday released an analysis projecting that Republicans' wishes to extend all of the expiring Bush tax cuts would add $36 billion more to the federal budget deficit next year than President Obama's plan to extend them only for families making under $250,000.
Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee requested the study, so we don't know if the panel's disgraced chairman, Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, pulled strings to have revenues from rental income on Caribbean villas excluded from the calculus. We also don't know if the historically proven stimulus effects of low tax rates got short shrift - though it's a pretty good bet, given the record of congressional revenue estimators.
But for argument's sake, let's say the JCT is right. Isn't it worth taking away $36 billion from Uncle Sam to get this dreadful economy to generate some private-sector jobs?
The president and Congress are already apparently willing to add to the deficit what JCT claims will be $202 billion in 2011 to extend the Bush tax cuts for the "non-rich." After spending well over a trillion dollars in various job-creating stimuli that haven't created jobs, an additional $36 billion is by comparison a pittance - but it is a healthy sum that investors could use to create jobs for those considered the "non-rich."
How many people with jobs today work for a poor employer? And how many people without jobs today are longing to be offered a job by one of the fat cats the Democrats have demonized in their campaigns and punished in the name of the people now in the unemployment lines?
Unfortunately, President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democratic majorities in Congress are locked into their class warfare ideology. Allowing the job creators of the U.S. economy to keep their lowered tax rates would mean letting them keep close to $36 billion of their own money in 2011, and the party's base cannot stomach such thoughts.
The media have actually carted out, of all people, one of Ronald Reagan's great betrayers, former Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, as one of the "Republicans" advising that tax rates be allowed to rise to the pre-George W. Bush levels.
Stockman, it should never be forgotten, left the Reagan administration under a dark cloud. His blatantly opportunistic kiss-and-tell book, published during Reagan's second term, immortalized Stockman's place on the wrong side of history. The book was subtitled "Why the Reagan Revolution Failed."
The Reagan Revolution, it must be remembered, was not limited to foreign policy. Yes, the Gipper set in motion what most considered impossible: the demise of the evil Soviet empire.
But he set this great nation's economic engine back into motion too, with large, across-the-board tax cuts, after the economy had been weighted down by tax policies designed to soak the rich - policies that really choked the poor and squeezed the middle class by depriving them of jobs.
It will be comical - and infuriating - to see the biggest spenders in history masquerading as champions of fiscal restraint as they boast of refusing to add $36 billion to the deficit. What employer on earth is going to hire workers when we have people in power who think an economy with nearly 10% unemployment should be hit with a big automatic tax rate increase?
