Last week’s Cavuto on Business (10/6/12) discussed the looming fiscal cliff coming on January 1. Near the end, the discussion turned to taxes. Ben Stein said, “I think high income people are going to have to take a lot of pain... Our taxes are just too low. We need higher taxes on well-to-do people. There’s not going to be a shortage of capital. There’s plenty of capital.” But panelists Gerri Willis and Charles Gasparino wrongly insisted raising taxes would lead to a “double-dip recession.”
Gasparino said, “Our problem isn’t that taxes are too low, because they’re not. Because if they were lower, we’d get more jobs and you’d get more revenue… You raise taxes, we’re going back to double-dip lane guaranteed.”
”Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with that more,” Willis said.
Adam Lashinsky said, “We have to have higher taxes.”
Willis exclaimed, “Naw, come on!”
”We will have a double dip recession,” Gasparino reiterated.
But as Bloomberg notes, after the 1993 tax hike under President Clinton, the economy created 15 million jobs and we had 3.8% GDP growth for the next five years. After the 2001 George W Bush tax cuts, the economy added 6.5 million jobs with a growth rate of 2.7% in the next five years. Stein is right, Charles and Willis are wrong.
How that smoke screen can convince anyone beats me.
Maybe in the 1990s, but the 1%ers now feel entitled to No Taxes and they’ve restructured the financial system to hide real income at home & abroad. Only a real American would understand the need to tax the 1%ers more but I fear most of them are simply members of the Money Nation which resides outside of laws and regulations. Look at the huge amounts of capital available now, yet little is being invested to create employment here. The prefered game is monetary speculation. Another tip-off, no one has any idea what the job market future will even consist of aside from some increase in elder-care services. This is why rMoney and his ilk can’t articulate a plan, they don’t have a positive one for America.
