Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [120]
Seriously, though, we have lost three million jobs in this country in the last two and a half years. It’s gotten so bad it’s even affected the children of semi-celebrities, who are usually immune to economic ups and downs. My daughter, Thomasin, just graduated from college, and she lost seventeen of those three million jobs. Four at Bear Stearns, two in the nonprofit sector, and one, ironically, in a job placement agency.3
I am a nut for statistics. Because numbers don’t lie. Here’s one that I think is particularly telling. During the six-plus years that the two Bushes have been president, there has not been one new net job created. Not one. Extrapolating from that, if the Bushes had run this country from its very inception to the present day, not a single American would have ever worked.
The idea that tax cuts for those at the very top will stimulate job creation is called supply-side, trickle-down, or “voodoo” economics. The concept is simple. By giving those at the top, who are, in theory, the most productive Americans, a tax break, you will motivate them to work even harder and create more wealth, more jobs, and a bigger pie for everyone.
That reasoning explains why, when Bill Clinton wanted to raise taxes on the top 1 percent in 1993 to deal with the then-record deficit, Republicans said his plan would cause a recession. Here’s a sampling.
I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is the Democrat machine’s recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable.
—Newt Gingrich, August 5, 1993
The Clinton plan is a one-way ticket to recession. This plan does not reduce the deficit . . . but it raises taxes and it puts people out of work.
Senator Phil Gramm, July 28, 1993
This plan will not work. If it was to work then I’d have to become a Democrat and believe that more taxes and bigger government is the answer.
Representative John Kasich, R-OH4
July 28, 1993
So every Republican in Congress voted against Clinton’s Deficit Reduction Act. It passed in both houses by one vote. (Gore broke the tie in the Senate.) The next eight years saw the longest period of economic growth in American history. Also, bolstered by the U.S., most of the world experienced an economic boom.
It’s taken as gospel by conservatives that everyone will work harder when they’re paying a 33 percent marginal tax rate than when they are paying a 39.6 percent rate. I heard Rush Limbaugh make a point that attempted to illustrate their logic. He said that if we taxed people at a 100 percent marginal rate, the government would get no revenue because no one would work. And, for once, I had to agree with him. I think the marginal tax rate should be somewhere between zero and 100 percent.
Bush made a point that I didn’t find quite as compelling in his acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican convention, the same speech in which he lied about the army divisions not being ready for duty. He said, “On principle, no one in America should have to pay more than a third of their income to the federal government.”
The crowd went nuts.
It struck me as odd that there would exist on principle such a specific number for the optimum top marginal rate. And that this principle would somehow apply to every economic circumstance. I also thought it was lucky for Bush that this specific number was one third, rather than a messier or more complicated fraction. What if the Heritage Foundation had determined that the perfect top marginal rate was something slightly smaller than one third? Would Bush have gotten as rousing a cheer if he had said, “On principle, no one in America should have to pay more than nine twenty-ninths of their income to the federal government!”? Or worse, what if the optimum marginal rate were an irrational number, which cannot be expressed as a fraction?5 How many digits beyond the decimal point would Bush have been willing to go?
No. I think the