Tax Cuts 102:
Quote:
In 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration’s economic team met to discuss a second round of tax cuts, which would follow Bush’s 2001 cuts. At the meeting, “then-Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill pleaded that the government — already running a $158 billion deficit — was careening toward a fiscal crisis.” Allegedly, Cheney replied by saying that “deficits don’t matter.”
Six years later, the Bush administration’s consistent belief that deficits don’t matter has increased the national debt to over $10 trillion. This is the highest dollar amount ever, and pushes the debt to 69% of the gross domestic product, which is the highest percentage since 1955.
Bush has presided over the largest increase in the debt of any president in history. When he took office, “the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion.” In eight years, there has been an increase of over 70%.
And the Bush administration has seemingly not learned any lessons from this, as the FY2009 budget had a near-record deficit of $407 billion. This deficit was calculated before the administration spent $900 billion rescuing troubled financial institutions and proposed a $700 billion economic bailout. The bailout bill put forth by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson increased the federal debt ceiling — the amount to which the debt is legally allowed to go — to $11.3 trillion.
As the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities has shown, 42% of the “fiscal deterioration” and explosion of the deficit that occurred under Bush was due to tax cuts:
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And the moral of the story is, tax cuts lead to deficits, period.
What we need is tax increases and enhanced collections which the GOP is already sabotaging. Question is why? Do they really want to bankrupt America? Perhaps not, but cutting entitlements is a very enticing prospect.
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/si...-40193bdadd2e/