h/t to Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars
Instead, Congress should let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthiest Americans and use the additional tax revenues that are generated to invest in infrastructure and research. "Invest" is the right word. Putting money into infrastructure — such as roads, bridges, broadband, the smart grid and public transit — as well as carefully chosen research initiatives provides a foundation for future growth. As important, it puts funds in the hands of those who will spend them, generating demand that will pull us out of our economic crisis and toward a new cycle of growth.
No one particularly enjoys paying taxes, but one lesson we should have learned by now is that for the good of the country, we need to tax people like me more. At a minimum, we need to return to the tax rates of the Clinton era, when the economy performed far better. Simply taxing the wealthiest 2% of Americans at the same rates they were taxed before the Bush tax cuts could reduce the national deficit by $700 billion over the next 10 years. Remember, paying slightly more in personal income taxes won't change my investment choices at all, and I don't think a higher tax rate will change the investment decisions of most other high earners.
What will change my investment decisions is if I see an economy doing better, one in which there is demand for the goods and services my investments produce. I am far more likely to invest if I see a country laying the foundation for future growth. In order to get there, we first need to let the Bush-era tax cuts for the upper 2% lapse. It is time to tax me more.
Nice to see folks step up to the plate.
--the BB
2 comments:
God bless Linda McG, who eloquently said what so many of us have been thinking.
And she said it from a position which makes all the difference - the position of having enough to share in hard times, and of understanding that one doesn't get a thousand times as much money as the "average" working American by working a thousand times as long or a thousand times as hard, or by being a thousand times as smart - they get it by fortuitous transfer from the working people all around them.
It's wonderful to know that SOME PEOPLE who have known a life of privilege and opportunity are thankful and humble and generous in a way which would make Jesus of Nazareth smile.
Amen!
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