Posted on 10/01/2016 8:49:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
You've got to hand it to Team Hillary Clinton. Its message discipline is awesome -- at least in terms of taxes. It reminds me of the orderly march of the Chinese Red Army on the way to battle.
Here's the latest message: The George W. Bush tax cuts were responsible for the financial meltdown and recession of 2008-09. That's a new low for Hillarynomics.
In this week's debate, Clinton said: "Trickle-down it did not work. It got us into the mess we were in in 2008 and 2009. Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn't worked."
OK. So in 2003, President Bush got a modest reduction in the top income tax rate and bigger reductions in the tax rates on capital gains and dividends. And this caused the financial crisis? How it did is virtually unknowable.
My pal, American Enterprise Institute scholar Jim Pethokoukis, who's no Trump supporter, put it like this: "Wouldn't the George W. Bush tax cuts -- most of which President Obama extended -- have stimulated demand and/or improved supply-side incentives to work, save and invest?"
Pethokoukis cited an AEI study on inequality that found "strong evidence linking credit booms to banking crises, but no evidence that rising income concentration was a significant determinant of credit booms." He also pointed out that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report blamed banks, regulators, government agencies and credit raters for the recession.
I would add to this list of culprits a boom-and-bust Federal Reserve policy, where interest rates were held too low for too long. And let's add federal housing mandates that virtually eliminated income and job qualifications for loans, as well as highly overleveraged bank mortgage loans and derivatives.
But not the Bush tax cuts.
Back to Hillary's Red Army. In recent debates with pro-Clinton economists, several of whom are good friends, I heard the same accusations -- Bush and his so-called tax cuts for the rich are to blame.
I challenged one of these Clinton supporters to find me an example where across-the-board tax increases generated economic growth. Have we ever taxed our way into prosperity? Never. This particular Clinton defender acknowledged that across-the-board tax hikes would put a stop to prosperity. But he argued that that's not her plan.
Let me pull out my list of Clinton tax hikes: a $350 billion income tax increase in the form of a 28-percent cap on itemized deductions (without lowering personal tax rates); a more-than $400 billion "fairness" tax hike in the form of a 4 percent "surcharge" on high-end earners; and the "Buffet rule," which would establish a 30-percent minimum tax on earners with adjusted gross incomes over $1 million.
Clinton also proposes increasing the estate tax rate to a range of 45 to 65 percent and reducing the exemption to $3.5 million.
Remember, estate taxes are already hit once by the income tax, and again by the capital-gains tax. Here, Clinton would end the stepped-up capital gains tax basis and instead value the gain all the way back to the initial transaction.
One of my favorite economists, Scott Grannis, calls this legalized theft.
Clinton would also raise the capital gains tax to over 40 percent, unless gains are held for more than six years; cap various business deductions (without lowering the corporate rate); and install some sort of exit tax for corporate earnings overseas (which are overseas to avoid the high corporate rates she will not reduce).
Then, there's her proposed tax on stock trading, her attraction to a payroll tax hike, her openness to a carbon tax, and her endorsement of a steep soda tax and a 25 percent national gun tax.
If this list does not constitute across-the-board tax hikes, I don't know what would.
Now, contrast this with Trump's plan to reduce tax rates for individuals and large and small businesses (while abolishing the death tax).
His new 15 percent corporate tax-rate plan would unleash overseas-profits repatriation and a huge surge in corporate investment. By itself, the business tax reform could grow the economy by 4 percent.
But Trump has to be more persuasive. He could highlight how middle-income wage earners benefit most from lower business taxes. He could emphasize his tax cut on small mom-and-pop businesses. He could explain that lower individual tax rates boost what President Ronald Reagan called "take-home pay" -- more money in your pocket. He could stress how lower business taxes lead to a large increase in incentives that boost investment, productivity, risk-taking, new business formation and worker wages.
The biggest issue in this campaign is the economy/wages/jobs. Trump must hammer home how his plan to boost all three contrasts drastically with Hillary's Red Army march of tax-hike destruction.
He has a prosperity plan. She has a recession plan.
Americans will always vote for prosperity. But the case has to be made.
Hillary: Taxes will skyrocket and the economy will tank.
Trump: Taxes will be cut for individuals and businesses and the economy will zoom upwards.
It’s that simple.
Fixed it for you.
BBB
Alinsky/Soros live in Hillary/Soeotoro, et.al., to destroy America. She is such a horrible liar to boot that she says contradictory weird stuff and no one calls her... like her talking about those basement-dwelling millennials who want the free stuff, no-debt college and good jobs out the gate. Really now, Hillary, do you believe in Legalized Thievery or Not???
Of course, she sees "baskets" of groups from whom she has a right to "redistribute" their earnings in order to buy votes from her "chosens."
Tired of having the fruits of their labors confiscated by an overpowering British government, America’s Founders declared themselves free and independent.
Most American schoolchildren can recite their claim that “. all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Less familiar, however, are these lines from their Declaration of Independence:
“He ( King George III ) has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance …. He has combined with others to subject us, … imposing taxes on us without our consent.”
What, then, did the Founders consider to be the real cornerstone of man’s liberty and happiness? On what basic premise did they devise their Constitution? Let them speak for themselves:
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God … anarchy and tyranny commence. PROPERTY MUST BE SECURED OR LIBERTY CANNOT EXIST”-John Adams
“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort …. This being the end of government, that is NOT a just government,… nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has … is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.”-James Madison
Their guiding principle was that people come together to form governments in order to SECURE their rights to property – not to create an entity which will, itself, “take from the mouths of labor the bread it has earned.” What was wrong for individual citizens to do to one another, they believed, was equally wrong for government to do to them.
The right to own property and to keep the rewards of individual labor opened the floodgates of progress for the benefit of the entire human race. Millions have fled other countries to participate in the Miracle of America.
Liberals know that higher tax rates will slow or shrink the economy, and are counterproductive. Even Crazy Eyes Mark Dayton of Minnesota admitted that. That does not matter. it’s all about “fairness” (again from Dayton).
Linda Tripp Cracks Open Hillary’s Scandals Again Including Vince Foster, Travelgate & Whitewater http://tinyurl.com/jftsgnp
Hillary’s ‘message discipline’ is SAVED FOR the yahoos in flyover... when she speaks to fellow ‘elites’ they GET HER TRUTH... HER TOTAL CONTEMPT FOR EVERYDAY AMERICANS:
“In Hacked Fundraiser Recording, Hillary Mocks Bernie Supporters “Living In Their Parents’ Basement”
“It is important to recognize what’s going on in this election. Everybody who’s ever been in an election that I’m aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there. Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is — I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.”
If she wins I wonder what country she would invade first for it’s gold?.
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