[image: newsweek]

Tax Cuts Anyone?

Promising a tax cut is a gimmick that some politicians try to get voters to buy into again and again with every election cycle. Nearly all of their proposals, however, would give huge tax cuts to the wealthy, small tax cuts to the middle class, and nothing to the poor. This consequence would bring about rising budget deficits, thus giving them the additional incentive to blame “government giveaway” programs for the shortfalls while calling for big spending cuts in Food Stamps, aid to dependent children, and most other programs except national defense. Such cuts only make the rich richer and the poor even poorer—while accelerating a day of reckoning that their greed blinds them from being able to see.

The Pitch: Tax cuts put more money in your pockets, and less in the government’s pockets. And you know how to spend your own money better than the government does. Besides, tax cuts create jobs while they grow the economy. They’re good for you, good for me, and good for everyone.

The Reality. A tax cut and lowering the tax rates are not the same. For example, the bottom 47 percent of residents do not have enough income to pay income taxes at all today. A lower tax rate would do nothing for them. That amounts to 67 million workers, the very people who need additional income. But a tax cut of 14.6 percent for the wealthy would put billions of additional dollars in their hands. Moreover, nearly all of that money would go into personal wealth accounts (stocks, bonds, and real estate) that produce more wealth for them but next to nothing for the economy. (See Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman’s Oct. 12th NY Times op-ed article, Voodoo Never Dies).

Hidden deep within their tax cut scheme is the grandest prize of all for the wealthy: elimination of the inheritance tax. They falsely call this tax a “death tax.” Few people are against inheriting wealth—up to a limit of say, $2 or $3 million. But who could possibly favor someone inheriting $25 or $50 billion for doing nothing when that same pool of trillions of dollars that we all helped to produce could actually stimulate the economy and create millions of new jobs, reduce the debt, rebuild bridges and highways, provide education for retraining, stimulate research and development in a host or areas, and solve most of our social ills?

The wealthy already hold about $76 trillion of wealth. This total doubles in value every 10 years at its long-term compound annual growth rate of 7.2 percent. Elimination of the inheritance tax would accelerate that growth beyond everyone’s imagination before it brought on the greatest Depression and the bloodiest revolution the world has ever seen. In 50 years that total would reach $2.4 quadrillion, The economy would dry up long before that total came into being, while bringing with it the end of civilization as we know it. [1]

The best way to stop these outcomes is to deny everyone who advocates such tax cuts the political power to make them happen. Vote “No” to all political candidates for any public office—local, state, or national—who campaign for or advocate tax cuts. It’s better to stop them now than 20 or 30 years down the road when our children or our grandchildren will have to do the job that we saw coming but did nothing to stop.
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 [1] An alternative outcome might see an invasion by China and/or Russia who could merely come in amidst the economic and revolutionary carnage and take the starving USA without firing a shot.