Pointing out facts is rather easy, but cherry picking data to support your ideology has become your calling card. It's just too bad that you've had to stoop to the level of needing the assistance of a part time ski instructor and writer of fiction to 'prove' your point.kalm wrote: I believe it was you who started in with the economic facts. So I'm merely playing the game with ya. That's the fun with economics - you can share all of the facts you want, highlighting some strange coincidences like the part time tennis instructor has done. And thanks to the complicated nature of markets, it's still easy to spin those facts to fit your ideology, which you sometimes do quite well.
Nice cherry picking again. What we do know that every major tax decrease in the past century was followed by a long period of growth and prosperity, and every bubble and crash was due to a massive failure of government. Whether it was the restrictive monetary policy and the abject failure of the Federal Reserve System to prevent bank failures causing the "Great Depression", or abject failure of Congress to listen to it's own regulators allowing Fannie and Freddie to cook their books and blow up the derivatives market in 2008.But what we do know, regardless of other influences, is that every major tax cut from the last century was followed by a bubble and a crash.
Compared to today's confiscatory tax rates, taxes were low in the 1920's through the start of WWII. Just as an example, in 1935 $2,000 in household income would have comfortably put you in the top 10% of income earners, but your tax bill would only be 4%. In comparison, someone making in the top 10% today will pay about 25% to 28% of their income in taxes. The top level kicks in at about $315,000 today, while the top level didn't kick in until that person made over $1,000,000 a year in 1935. Wow, the definition of 'rich' sure has changed over the years.And every significant tax increase was followed by solid growth. We can only speculate about how things would have turned if the taxes were kept low during the depression. But it's pretty easy to speculate that if they had, we would have been in far more debt paying for the war, the Marshall Plan, and the GI Bill.
By all means, let's go back the proportionality of income taxes back in 1935.
Are you specifically talking about state or federal roads and highways, and state or federal dams?Would we have even been able to afford all of those CCC projects and later, the highways that benefited the private sector so much? Would the auto and oil industries have built their own roads? Would the universities have provided free eductation to the GI's out of their own pocket or perhaps the businesses that benefited from highly eductated workforce? Maybe all of the farmers could have passed the hat around and built their own Hoover and Grand Coulee dams?
The GI Bill was a bipartisan bill written by a (gasp) Republican and the least we could have done for our troops coming home from war. Too bad only 51% of the returning vets participated.
Maybe in "Progressiveland", facts have gray area, but in the real world they are black and white.I know you think you've got it all figured out and this does not fit your black and white view. So I'm sorry about that.
