It's time to tax the rich: Clinton did it and the economy took off

It's time to tax the rich
Contrary to the Republican mantra, Clinton did it and the economy took off.
LA Times
By Moshe Adler
November 17, 2010

The final two years of the George H.W. Bush presidency brought a creeping recession, with an unemployment rate that increased from 5.6% in 1990 to 7.5% in 1992. In June 1992, just five months before the elections, the rate reached 7.8%, and Bush lost his reelection bid ("It's the economy, stupid").

What did the new president do about the economy? President Clinton in 1993 proposed to raise the highest marginal tax rate immediately from 31% to 39.6%. In a Wall Street Journal article, Martin Feldstein, the former chief economic advisor to President Reagan and then as well as now a professor of economics at Harvard, opined that "Mr. Clinton's proposal to raise the marginal tax rates of high-income individuals would hurt incentives, weaken the economy and waste investment dollars."

This was, of course, a reincarnation of the GOP's trickle-down theory — tax cuts for the rich would eventually benefit the middle and lower classes. But Republicans did not let the fact that the Reagan tax cuts had decimated government services and created huge deficits stand in their way. Claiming that it was wrong to raise taxes on the rich in the middle of a recession, every one of them, in both houses, voted against it. Forty-one Democratic representatives and six Democratic senators joined them. The tax increase passed by only the narrowest of margins. In the House the vote was 218 to 216, while in the Senate the increase passed with a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Al Gore.

And what were the consequences? In the seven years that followed, the unemployment rate decreased steadily, every single year, until it reached 4% in 2000...

Do Republicans actually want America to fail?

"The vote was 57-41. Oddly, the side with 41 votes actually won. Because that is how the Founders wanted things to not work in this god-blessed nation."

Jun 24, 2010 18:20 ET
Do Republicans actually want America to fail?
By Alex Pareene
AP

Tomorrow, more than a million people who've been out of work for six months or more will lose unemployment benefits, because Senate Republicans and theoretical Democrat Ben Nelson joined together to block an already too-small package of half-measures designed to provide some modicum of help for the nation's millions of jobless people.

The vote was 57-41. Oddly, the side with 41 votes actually won. Because that is how the Founders wanted things to not work in this god-blessed nation...