When Good Tax Cuts Go Bad

George Bush inherited Bill Clinton's Dot Com Bubble and Bill Clinton's ill fated policy of treating Osama bin laden like a common ordinary Chicago politician. What was Bush to do with an economy facing real and unexpected catastrophes like 9/11?

Bush looked to recent history and decided to pass a stimulus program that cut taxes and put more money into the pockets of working families and the businesses that hired them.

Unlike Obama's now failed stimulus plan to enrich a bloated government at the expense of hard working families who had to someday pay for it all, Bush's stimulus plan worked swimmingly.

For the eight years of the Bush presidency, the unemployment rate per year was, 4.7%, 5.8%, (after 9/11,) 6.0%, 5.5%, 5.1%, 4.6%, 4.6%, and finally a whopping 5.8%. Do you remember the good old days when Democrat complained of Bush's "jobless recovery?"

Obama, on the other hand, fell victim to policies he and his own party championed such as subprime mortgages to poor people who could never pay them back. While Obama's unemployment record is yet to be fully written, Obama's unemployment rate is due to hover around 10% for as long as the eye can see. How is that "hope & change" working for ya?

Not letting a crisis go to waste, Bush trusted the American people to spend their own way out of the Dot Com Bubble and the aftermath of 9/11. Bush encouraged people to shop and spend. Bush may have even told people to spend money in Las Vegas. (If you don't place that next bet, then the terrorists win...)

Bush was simply employing a simple and proven course to employ more people by cutting their taxes. It worked for Kennedy, Reagan, and Canada after all. And no one ever had to "pay for these tax cuts" either! In each case that tax cuts were employed, more people worked and more tax revenue was sent to Uncle Sam and his cousin in Canada.

Even Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos pointed out this fact to Obama during a presidential debate. Obama was told that when the capital gains tax rates were cut, capital gains tax revenue to the government increased. Obama, caught without his teleprompter, told the truth about what he really thought about tax cuts in general: Obama was for raising taxes on capital gains, even though it would lower the tax revenue from capital gains,....(get this)...because of "fairness."

William F Buckley once famously said that any politician talking about tax fairness should be electrocuted.

So now we have "the Bush tax cuts" ready to expire despite the massive contraction it will create in the already starved Obama economy. Since when do tax laws come with an "expiration date?" Hells bells! We were paying the "telephone tax" to pay for the Spanish American War up until Bush killed that tax too. Is the Spanish American War tax on telephones due to come back next year? Even the damned "death tax" won't die!

While America is looking for candidates who would oppose ludicrous ideas such as tax cuts with expiration dates, maybe voters should look to candidates other than John McCain. It was McCain after all who "reached across the aisle" and "cut the deal" with Democrats to put those expiration dates on the tax cuts in the first place.


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