Tax Cuts Galore
The house approved a bill extending a number of Bush’s tax cuts along mostly party lines (guess who was for them). While the usual cries of tax cuts benefit the rich more than the poor permeated the media, it’s hard to imagine tax cuts for the poor that the rich couldn’t benefit from. It’s doesn’t take more than basic accounting to realize that if you have more money you have more flexibility in how you earn money. By contrast if you’re strapped for cash there’s only so much you can do. If you tax income, high wage earners will divert their earnings to perks or cap gains and it will hit the middle class; if you tax don’t tax income but tax cap gains; high wage earners will limit their wages to the tax effective and defer the rest (take a look at some CEO benefit packages for great examples of deferred income). If you tax dividends then companies spend more on stock buybacks.
It’s all well and good to decry Bush’s tax cuts as benefiting the rich, but what tax cuts do not?