Raise Taxes Why Dont You - Road to the Middle Class

Rangel wants to make history. His staff is hard at work on an audacious plan that over the next decade would redistribute up to a trillion dollars in American income through the tax system.

He wants to raise tax rates on upper-income Americans and raise the top capital-gains tax rate up to 35 percent.

Tactically, the Democrats have done a good job over the 12 years of the Republican Congress. With their combative rhetoric they have prevented any real reform of the welfare state. All their public-sector jobs and pensions pretty well escaped the axe.

And now that people are tired of the Republicans, Democrats have a chance to advance the frontiers of the welfare state once again.

It could be a bumpy ride, because chances are that Democrats will get into power for the first time in half a century with the economy in the tank. Don’t believe it? Here’s the how the economy looked to the Democrats when they entered the White House on a change in party starting in 1961:

1961, Kennedy: economy growing nicely after 1958 recession.
1977, Carter: economy growing nicely after 1974 recession.
1993, Clinton: economy growing nicely after 1990 recession.

Compare that with the Republican experience:

1969, Nixon: recession in 1969-70.
1981, Reagan: 1981-82 recession.
2001, Bush: recession in 2001.

So if Charlie Rangel thinks he’s going to raise tax rates in 2009, he’d better think again, especially if the economy starts tanking any time soon. If Democrats start piling on new taxes and spending it could really screw up the economy, just like in 1933 to 1939.

Only back in the 1930s, nobody blamed the Democrats for their economic incompetence. But this time it could be different. And it could turn the American people against paying taxes just so that Democrats and their supporters could live on easy street at the expense of working America.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: Nancy Coppock on 09/18/07 4:56am

Christopher, That is the scariest scenario I can imagine! Even the thought of calling those making $250K 'rich' is completely relative to where one lives. Do you favor the flat tax or the national sales tax? I would appreciate your thinking on the subject.

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
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F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
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Physics, Religion, and Psychology

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