What America Has Given Up for Ten Years of Bush Tax Cuts
Tuesday 7 June 2011
by: Zaid Jilani,
ThinkProgress via truthout
Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither.
The cost of these budget-busting 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was, as estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice, roughly $2.5 trillion through 2010. But America didn’t have to go down this route of cutting taxes and hoping for growth to miraculously appear. There were other policy options available to policymakers.
ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project — which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars — has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts. While not all of these policies are currently performed by the federal government, they do represent an accurate calculation of the monetary tradeoffs, and each one individually would cost the same as the Bush tax cuts. Here are ten alternatives we could’ve pursued instead:
(More here.)
by: Zaid Jilani,
ThinkProgress via truthout
Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither.
The cost of these budget-busting 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was, as estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice, roughly $2.5 trillion through 2010. But America didn’t have to go down this route of cutting taxes and hoping for growth to miraculously appear. There were other policy options available to policymakers.
ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project — which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars — has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts. While not all of these policies are currently performed by the federal government, they do represent an accurate calculation of the monetary tradeoffs, and each one individually would cost the same as the Bush tax cuts. Here are ten alternatives we could’ve pursued instead:
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
It all pales in comparison to what America has given up in the last two years of a complete squandering of the nation's wealth by 'government investment' of bailouts, stimlus packages, cash for clunkers, home buyer credits to reinflate the housing bubble, money printing, political favors to base consitutencies, which products we may not longer buy and which products we must buy, new wars in Libya and Yemen, sky high energy prices, sky high food prices, slu high unemployment, financial overhauls that won't prevent but enable future bailouts, and last of all stagflation.
Oh, please return us to the Bush years!! The last two have been marked by the most incompentent bunch of children the country has ever seen.
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