Tax cuts for the rich: Not the solution to everything?
If you happen to live in the United States and own a television that you happen to have access to on weekdays at 4:00 p.m. you might want to check out the Dylan Ratigan show, if only for the regular appearances made by Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, which I will continue to plug on this blog until every last American is watching it.
Nobody shatters conventional wisdom better than Cenk:
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That’s right—cutting taxes for the rich doesn’t always help the economy. Historically, the economy has always done the best when taxes on the wealthy are at their highest.
Of course to be fair, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. It might just be a coincidence that the Great Depression came at a time of low taxes for the rich, that the golden years of the 50s and 60s came at a time of high taxes for the rich, and the current “Great Recession” came after a period of historically low taxes for the rich thanks to George W. Bush’s deficit-inflating tax cuts which the republicans now want to make permanent.
But the reasoning makes sense. Republicans want us to think that if you let the rich keep more of their money, they’ll put it back into the economy and everyone will benefit. But it seems that what actually happens when you let them keep their money is that they just keep their money. If, on the other hand, they don’t have so much money to keep, they have to rely more on their businesses for income, and they reinvest more of their money into those businesses which opens up opportunities for everyone.
Is this debatable? Yes. But it’s a debate we should be having instead of just accepting what we’ve always been told.
