Dan Gross on Tax Cuts

Daniel Gross over at Slate, has a few key words for those on the kool-aid about retaining the Bush junta's tax cuts.  He makes a number of points on why the entire "discussion" is but an election gimmick executed by Republicans, who have no interest in either fiscal solvency or reasonable management of the federal government.

Barry Ritholtz points out on his blog, The Big Picture, how ridiculous the whole debate has become and highlight's Gross' most salient point:

The bold and confident assertions made about the links between tax rates and economic growth, market performance, and prosperity are almost certainly wrong. Turn on CNBC or look at the Wall Street Journal op-ed page these days, and you'll learn that we must keep tax rates on capital gains, dividends, and income precisely where they are because shifting them to different levels will retard economic growth. Keep this in mind: The people who designed the current, unsustainable tax system promised us that lower marginal rates, and lower taxes on capital and dividends, would boost the economy, promote investment, create jobs, spur market performance, and raise everybody's income. They were wrong. (It's no coincidence that these same people also warned us that raising taxes in 1993 would kill market returns and the economy. They were wrong then, too. They're pretty much always wrong.) As I've pointed out, the years under the current tax regime have been a lost decade. Pick your metric—median income, employment, stock market returns, economic growth—the low-tax '00s sucked. Yet proponents of keeping the tax cuts persist in making the argument: To avoid a repeat of the past decade, we must have the exact same tax policies as we did for the past decade.

In other words, the economic svengali's of the Bush junta and the dimwits of the Republican Party didn't know what they were doing when Clinton was in office, they didn't know what they were talking about when their man Dubya was hectoring us on the benefits of supply-side economics, and they certainly don't have any meaningful insights into the economy now that their very policies and lack of regulation have thrown the entire financial world off kilter.