That's more or less how Jeb Bush defended his tax plan to Fox News Sunday after he was slammed for giving lopsided tax breaks to the wealthy. He told Chris Wallace: “The simple fact is 1 percent of people pay 40 percent of all the taxes. So of course, tax cuts for everybody is going to generate more for people that are paying a lot more. I mean that’s just the way it is.”
We've been told that lower taxes and more "growth" equates to higher wages and more jobs (known as "trickle-down economics"). But since the depth of the Great Recession, even though stock prices and corporate profits are much higher, a lot more people are "not in the labor force" (and just aren't being counted in the official unemployment rate) — and wages are still down (not to mention, more people are also working part-time and temp jobs).
According to Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bill believes that the rich and and powerful aren't rich and powerful enough. But before we examine Bill O'Reilly bearing false witness again, let's take a quick assessment of cable TV news in general, and then see where Bill fits in to the scheme of things (pun intended) — or you can just skip to Jay's rebuttal.
When Hillary Clinton recently borrowed Elizabeth Warren's talking points and claimed "the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top" against regular working people, did she mention reforming the tax code — and then offer any solutions? The simple answer is "no"; and unless she is ever pressed by the mainstream "liberal" media, she will probably dodge this question the same way GE dodges taxes.
Are those our only choices? And if so, what's it going to be? Cutting defense spending or cutting Social Security? Because with a GOP-dominated Congress, it won't mean increasing revenues by raising taxes on those who are most able to afford a slight increase.
It didn't take long before the new GOP House began passing a series of deficit-hiking tax cuts that will primarily help the rich at the expense of everybody else. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the new chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (which writes tax legislation), wants to make some previous tax breaks permanent — arguing that Congress has previously extended certain tax breaks before.
There are those (like Stephen Moore at the Heritage Foundation) who have persistently been saying for years that the U.S. should lower it's corporate tax rate to be more globally "competitive". They have repeatedly said that America has the highest [statutory] corporate tax rate in the entire world — although, in reality, American multi-national corporations usually have a much lower "effective" tax rate, because of all the Congressionally approved "loopholes" in our tax code.
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