A Few Requests for Taxes
Despite extending the Bush tax cuts in December, President Obama has been repeating the mantra that we need to tax more to get out of debt. Yesterday he made the same claim, and pointed fingers at Republicans while doing it. He went on to say that these millionaires and billionaires are enjoying the best tax rates since before he was born. That's not true, unless he was born in the 1980s. While the current top tax rate is 35%, under Reagan and the first President Bush, the rates were between 28 and 31%.
But even if what he said was true - raising taxes isn't the way to raise revenue. Since 2005, the marginal tax rates remained the same - but the revenue we collected has changed. Back in 2007, Federal tax receipts were 18.5% of the GDP. Since Obama took office, that percentage is under 15. Because tax receipts are a result of how good the economy is growing, I don't have to tell you how this economy is doing now. For example, when all that money was coming in from taxes, the unemployment rate was around 4.5%. In 2010, it was 9.5%. And as I've said time and time again, we don't have a revenue problem - we have a spending problem. Ten years ago, the Congressional Budget Office actually predicted we'd be experiencing a surplus by now... when in fact we're on track to hit a one and a half trillion dollar deficit! Why? Because this Congress and administration don't know when enough is enough. Spending for this year alone is more than a trillion dollars higher than what the CBO had predicted. And those tax cuts for the so-called wealthy the Democrats keep disparagingthey ate up about $216 billion. In other words the Bush tax cuts were less than 10% of the more than $2 trillion difference between the CBO forecast and reality. Mr. Obama - please stop being so concerned with the people who are doing well in this country... they're paying their fair share - and then some! Try being more concerned about those not doing well - the 14 million unemployed!
Stop vilifying business. Make these tax cuts permanent and give businesses an opportunity to put those people back to work.
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