hypocritexposer
Well-known member
“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates…. [A]n economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs or enough profits.” —John F. Kennedy, 1963[1]
At a top rate of 70 percent in 1980, the top 1 percent paid $47 billion in federal taxes. Today, at a 35 percent rate, they paid more than $400 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, that is a nearly 300 percent increase in tax payments by the rich.
After the Reagan income-tax cuts in 1981, the highest-earning 1 percent more than doubled their collective income-tax payments, from $50 billion in 1981 to $114 billion in 1988.
After the 1986 tax reform act, income-tax payments by the rich rose from $70 billion to $146 billion in 1993.
After the 2003 tax cuts, payments by the rich increased from $256 billion in 2003 to $451 billion in 2007. Some of those revenue gains were inflated by the housing bubble, but there was certainly no revenue loss.
What matters most in collecting the taxes needed to run the government is how fast the economy grows and how many jobs are created. Raising tax rates on the prosperous—especially small-business owners, who would be exposed to higher taxes if the 2003 tax cuts expire—can be counted on to shrink the economy and stifle job creation.
All this talk about tax increases is really a political diversion from the real problem in Washington: overspending. The federal budget is now $3.8 trillion, compared with roughly $2 trillion in 2000. Reagan used to cast aside calls for higher taxes with a simple retort: “Never give a big spender a bigger allowance.” The spending disease is what really threatens to paralyze our economic future.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ir_22.htm