Ten liberal myths about taxes
January 30, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward
Having taken the reins of Congress, liberals have set their sights on undoing one of the Bush administration’s most successful initiatives: the 2003 tax cuts on capital gains and dividends.
To justify raising taxes on hardworking Americans, the Left has turned to some of its favorite myths about the tax cuts and the basic economic theories that underlie them. In a new paper sent to Capitol Hill, the White House and the media, Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl debunks the top ten liberal myths about the tax cuts.
Click here to read the facts behind these myths.
Myth #1: Tax revenues remain low.
Myth #2: The Bush tax cuts substantially reduced 2006 revenues and expanded the budget deficit.
Myth #3: Supply-side economics assumes that all tax cuts immediately pay for themselves.
Myth #4: Capital gains tax cuts do not pay for themselves.
Myth #5: The Bush tax cuts are to blame for the projected long-term budget deficits.
Myth #6: Raising tax rates is the best way to raise revenue.
Myth #7: Reversing the upper-income tax cuts would raise substantial revenues.
Myth #8: Tax cuts help the economy by “putting money in people’s pockets.”
Myth #9: The Bush tax cuts have not helped the economy.
Myth #10: The Bush tax cuts were tilted toward the rich.
Click here to e-mail the debunking of these liberal myths to your friends, family and colleagues.
Should Congress repeal the Bush tax cuts? Click here to take the MyHeritage.org poll.
Click here to read Brian Riedl’s paper for a full explanation of this debunking.
Bringing conservative views into the media
The Heritage Foundation continues to expand its reach into the mainstream media, which has long been dominated by liberal viewpoints. New statistics compiled by our communications and marketing office demonstrate that last year was one for the record books.
Combining local and national newspaper coverage, Heritage experts and research were cited in well over 8,000 news clips, with a combined circulation of almost a billion. That’s like being in The New York Times twice a day, every day, and four times on Sunday—for an entire year!
Responding to China’s space weapons tests
“The threat to our space security is real and growing,” Sen Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said yesterday at The Heritage Foundation. To meet this challenge, he said we must “commit ourselves to real space security and develop the ability to ensure our freedom of action in space.”
“Security in space is a vital national interest. Loss of access to space would threaten the very stability of our nation,” he argued in Heritage’s Allison Auditorium. He noted that our nation depends very much on satellites in space—for everything from financial transactions and television programming to foreign intelligence gathering and military communications.
On January 11, China destroyed an aging weather satellite using a missile-launched anti-satellite weapon. This brazen display came just few months after the reported “painting” of a U.S. reconnaissance satellite with a Chinese ground-based laser.
Click here to watch this event online (Windows Media format).
Keeping Washington’s flame alive
On February 19, many Americans will take the day off to celebrate George Washington’s birthday—erroneously called “President’s Day” in many quarters.
“Contrary to popular opinion, though, no act of Congress or order by any president has changed Washington’s Birthday to ‘Presidents Day,’” Heritage scholar Matthew Spalding explains in the cover article of the latest issue of American Legion magazine.
Click here for a history of the holiday and why it’s important to celebrate the first President.
The knee-jerk liberal reaction to health care reforms
How things have changed in Washington. In 1999, Heritage’s Mike Franc reports, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) collaborated on a sound proposal to revise the tax code to allow expanded health insurance coverage. Working across party lines, the pair suggested providing tax breaks for individuals who purchase their own health care. Liberals like Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Jim McDermott (D-WA) even sponsored legislation to make this reform possible.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush proposed a similar initiative, including the individual tax credit for health care purchases. “But liberals rejected his bid for a bipartisan solution,” Franc writes. “Stark refused to even hold hearings on it in the health subcommittee he chairs, saying the plan was ‘designed for disaster.’”
What happened? Why did liberals change course? Franc cites Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein, who argues that liberals have “shifted reflexively into partisan attack mode, mischaracterizing the impacts of the proposal and shamelessly parroting the propaganda from the labor dinosaurs at the AFL-CIO.”
In other news
- Thousands of radicals, including actress Jane Fonda, turned out in Washington last Saturday to protest the President’s decision to send additional troops to Iraq. Protesters even defaced parts of the Capitol, The Hill reports.
- Further reflecting the diminished relevance of big labor, union membership has dropped to just 12 percent of the workforce, down a half percentage point from last year and far lower than the 20.1 percent unionization in 1983. While 7.4 percent of private workers belong to unions, 36.2 percent of public workers are enrolled.
- The International Criminal Court may be set to begin its first trial, a war-crimes case against a Congolese militia leader. In a 2005 paper, Heritage’s Brett Schaefer explains why America is right to avoid the ICC’s bureaucratic nightmare.
- A 14-year-old German boy, who insists he is not male, has been receiving hormone treatments to become female—courtesy of the German taxpayer.
- The Associated Press inadvertently admits the scaremongering tactics of many environmentalists when it reports that scientists will explain “how much to be afraid” of global warming.
- President Bush is rightly opposed to raising taxes as part of a package to rein in runaway spending on entitlements like Social Security. Many liberals object to his stance, saying the problem is not the coming dramatic increase in entitlement spending but a lack of high taxes to pay for this spending.
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 Thursday, February 1 at 12:30 pm, author Dore Gold will discuss his new book, which explains the importance of Jerusalem to global jihad.
- On Monday, February 5 at noon, The Heritage Foundation will screen a never-before-seen Oval Office interview with President Reagan from 1986.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
