Operating with a deficit means, of course, that our government is spending more than it receives in revenues. The U.S. has been running a deficit since Geo. W. Bush squandered the Clinton surplus. Nevertheless, Romney proposes reducing the taxes of the category of people who logically would be assumed to be the biggest sources of federal revenue, the wealthiest. Romney gives no explanation for how this plan will magically work, but his general theme song is that reducing taxes on the wealthiest will enable them to create jobs. Unfortunately for the jobless (and the state of the economy), there are no historic examples of such increases to point to. In fact, despite Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, the opposite happened and considerably fewer private-sector jobs were created in Bush’s term than in Clinton’s.
The Republican claim that taxes on the wealthy are still too high and need to be lowered to improve the economy rings false when we consider that, in our country’s most prosperous period ever, the quarter-century from 1945 to 1970, the top marginal tax rate was never below 70 percent – and was 91 percent or higher for the first 12 years of that period. That top rate is now 35 percent and, with exclusions and loopholes, the wealthiest 400 richest Americans paid 17 percent of income on average last year, a past Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, reports.
Bob E. Crawford
Roanoke
