Liberals propose tax hikes
January 9, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward
Liberals have once again floated the idea of raising taxes to offset the costs of their big-government initiatives. “[I]t may be that (repealing) tax cuts for those making over a certain amount of money, $500,000 a year, might be more important to the American people than ignoring the educational and health needs of America's children,” Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Sunday.
This sort of class-warfare tax policy—which would punish the hard work and investment of America’s entrepreneurs to “pay for” dramatic increases in government interference in the economy—would cause far more problems than it solves. A tax increase would:
- Hurt the jobs market by punishing small businesses and entrepreneurs
- Depress the stock market by punishing investors
- Finance even more spending on big-government programs
Click here for more on why the tax cuts should be made permanent—not repealed.
What liberals don’t tell you about taxes
Liberals have spent a lot of time explaining how and why they’re going to raise taxes—but what they don’t tell you is that taxes are going to go up anyway. In a paper released last summer, Heritage economists Dan Mitchell and Stuart Butler point out that under current law, “the federal tax burden on Americans, as a proportion of income, will increase by almost one-fourth” in the coming decades.
“[E]ven making the Bush tax cuts permanent would shave only 1 percentage point off of this projected steep rise in taxes,” they write. “When state and local taxes are included, the U.S. tax burden will be comparable to the burden in today’s slow-growth Europe.”
The huge increase in taxes won’t do a thing to overcome the huge surge in spending on entitlements, which is the real threat to our nation’s economy. In fact, this rising tax burden “will likely make the spending problem worse” and “could exacerbate the economic damage” by discouraging investment and work.
And liberals want to pile new taxes on top of this?
Doing education right
Five years ago yesterday, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, a law which gave new power over the nation’s schools to federal bureaucrats. Far from bringing about a revolution in education policy, NCLB simply continued a decades-long trend of micromanagement from Washington.
Speaking yesterday at The Heritage Foundation, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) urged Congress to rethink education policy and consider instead a return to federalism and local control. They have introduced a bill, the Academic Partnerships Leading to Success (A-PLUS) Act, to encourage local control and innovative ideas from state governments.
Though No Child Left Behind had a noble goal, “it will be difficult to tweak it and fix it,” Sen. DeMint said. A better model for education reform than the top-down mandates imposed by NCLB would be welfare reform, where individual states served as “laboratories for change” and pioneered new ideas that were ultimately adopted across the nation.
Click here to read more on how to reform education.
In other news
- An American warplane attacked al Qaeda terrorists in northern Somalia on Sunday, the Pentagon revealed. The strike was reportedly against the organization’s regional leadership.
- President Bush is expected to announce a “surge” of troops to Iraq in a speech on Wednesday night at 9:00 pm. Instead of arguing for a strategy for victory in Iraq, liberals in Congress last week called for withdrawal.
- Deciding that laws passed by the legislature no longer reflect “social conditions and medical knowledge,” an Ontario court has taken another step towards undermining traditional marriage by permitting a child to have two mothers and one father. Advocates of same-sex marriage (which is legal in the Canadian province) often maintain that redefining marriage does not open the door to polygamy, though the actual results suggest otherwise.
- In his inaugural address last week, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick laid out an outdated vision for big government and called limited government a “fallacy.” “For a very long time now we have been told that government is bad,” he said, “that it exists only to serve the powerful and well-connected, that its job is not important enough to be done by anyone competent, let alone committed, and that all of us are on our own. Today we join together in common cause to lay that fallacy to rest.”
- France could soon best America—on taxes. French President Jacques Chirac has proposed lowering his nation’s corporate tax rate from 33 percent to 20 percent, which would be half of the American rate when state taxes are included.
- Andrew Roth at the Club for Growth notices something interesting: the stock market does better when Congress is out of session. So maybe the key to improving the economy is to reduce the time Congress spends in Washington.
- The Bush administration has said that the president will name Zalmay Khalilzad as America’s next United Nations ambassador. The Senate, which failed to confirm John Bolton as UN envoy, will have to approve Khalilzad to his new post.
Coming up at Heritage
To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.
- On Wednesday, January 10 at noon, author Mark Steyn will discuss his new book, America Alone, and the nation’s strategy in the war on terror.
- On Thursday, January 18 at noon, author Dinesh D’Souza will explain how the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
