Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt 26z
Taxes never should have been cut under Bush in the first place.
Clinton left Bush with a balanced budget and enough tax revenues to pay down the national debt in about 10 years. Bush and his "fiscal conservative" Republican cohorts blew the balanced budget and killed the government's tax revenues with his tax breaks.
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With the popping of the .com bubble, and losses after 9/11, we were headed for a recession. Bush lowered taxes to stimulate the economy. (Unfortunately they also increased spending like crazy! :-( )
Obama knows that lowering taxes works. It always has. When the government taxes more and spends more, the money that the government puts into the economy is always used much less efficiently than when you let citizens use it the way they want to.
As for the "balanced budget". First of all it was crafted by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in control of both houses for the first time since WWII, and secondly, it wasn't real anyway:
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.a...Fraudmises.org
"There is no such thing as real accounting in government, of course, since there are no profit-and-loss statements, only budgets. Conse-quently, there is no way of ever knowing, in an accounting sense, whether government is adding value or destroying it. All we know is that the budget grew by a certain amount, for some ostensible purpose. And government is constantly lying to the public about how much of the public?s money is being spent and what it is being spent on.
As Gene Epstein has reported in Barron?s, during the Clinton administration, vast sums were transferred from the Social Security and Federal Highway Trust Funds to the budget so that Clinton and the Republican Congress could take ?credit? for balancing the budget. Any corporate CEO who raided his employees? pension fund and put the money in the company coffers so that the bottom line would look good and he could earn himself a fat bonus would end up in prison.
The federal government practices what it calls ?baseline budgeting,? whereby federal agencies announce that they wish to increase their budgets by, say, 10 percent a year, and if they only increase them by 5 percent that is called a 5 percent budget ?cut.? There can be no better example of accounting fraud than calling a budget increase a cut.
The General Accounting Office, Congressional Budget Office, and other federal agencies also use ?static analysis? when analyzing and reporting to the public on tax policy changes. That is, they assume that taxation has no effect whatsoever on economic behavior. So, if we have a $10 trillion economy, and impose a flat 75-percent income tax, these ?authoritative? sources will announce that the IRS expects to collect $7.5 trillion in revenues, each year, ignoring several hundred years of economic theory and practice.
Perhaps the biggest accounting scam perpetrated by the state has to do with various governmental ?off-budget enterprises.? As James Bennett and I wrote in our 1983 book, Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector, for well over a century federal, state, and local governments have responded to citizen demands for tax, expenditure, and borrowing restraint by paying lip service to the demands while at the same time setting up the subterfuge of off-the-books government enterprises. "
