Serfs up: how coddling the rich is destroying the American dream
It’s a pretty rare day when you will find me posting DKOS articles here, but this one by Mark Sumner is right on. The GOP has declared war on the middle and lower classes and are now water carriers for the uber rich.
I’m very much pro capitalism, but I also recognize that it must be balanced via mixed economy mechanisms or it runs out of control. I dabbled with libertarianism in my youth and discovered that and pure capitalism is really just a long path to robber barons and dust bowls. Prosperity lies in a mixed economy.
This is an important article with lots of charts, please punch out to read the whole thing.
No matter how many times it’s said, lowering tax rates for the highest income Americans does not create jobs or stimulate the economy. In fact, a detailed look reveals that the overall economy does slightly better when taxes at the top are significantly higher. This also holds true on the state level, as states with higher top personal tax rates have growth rates and median incomes that average greater than those with low (or even no) taxes. No matter how many times the experiment is repeated, or how long you extend the results, cutting taxes for the wealthy does not stimulate growth.
The idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy will generate jobs is as much a myth as bigfoot, and I don’t mean the truck. It’s demand that stimulates economic growth and drives down unemployment. Demand isn’t generated by giving even more money to those who already have more than enough. It doesn’t come from a handful of people ordering up yachts. It’s certainly not created by rewarding those who engage in speculative investment. Demand grows when the much broader base of middle and working class have money available to meet needs ranging from feeding their families, to buying cars, to putting their kids through school.
