USA - Tax Cuts and Spending ...

David Cay Johnston: More Corporate Tax Breaks Will Not Stimulate the Economy
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Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kids college tuition? Done. And it wont cost you a penny. David Cay Johnston outlines his own fiscal therapy to end the economic crisis.


David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. He has the cover story in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine, titled Fiscal Therapy His most recent book is titled Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). He is a former reporter at the New York Times.


The notion that everything is solved by a tax cut, of course there are sensible tax policies you can have. But there are public needs we have in this society that cannot be accomplished by a tax cut. No tax cut builds a road. No tax cut puts a cop on the street. No tax cut educates a child in the way that it ought to be done. So this—only tax cuts, at a time when I think we have a deficiency in some areas that are important for the quality of our life, is a big disagreement.

The Bush tax cuts, all of them were financed with borrowed money. And where did we end up at the end of the Bush administration? If you add up all of the bailouts that the Bush administration did in the fall, the investments, the spending and the guarantees, its over $8 trillion. How much money is that? It is more than all of the income taxes paid by all Americans for the entire eight years of the Bush administration.

Thats the problem. The problem is that we look at spending and say, Oh, dont spend on highways. Dont spend on healthcare. But lets build Cold War weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we dont need them. Lets have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check. Unless everythings on the table, then youre going to have a disproportionate hit in some places.

I mean, why do we need to have health insurance? Health insurance companies have an incentive to not pay. Do we have kindergarten insurance? Do we have police insurance? Do we have road insurance? This is a bizarre system that we have that is unlike that anywhere else in the world, gives us the highest costs in the world and does not make our health status better...

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[dontliethetruth]

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