"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"
Hebrews 11:1, King James Bible
I've mentioned faith a number of times in my discussions of the Right, generally followed by a hyphen and the word "based." The Right takes a good deal of their ideology on faith: Drilling brings down prices. Government is bad. We are God's country. But little does the Right take on faith to a greater degree than the mantra, "Tax cuts create jobs."
I beg to differ and there is objective evidence called history. Let's start with some data from the Economic Policy Institute.
In fact, employment has dropped following tax cuts every time they've been cut. Here's Nosy's hypothesis: Taxes are always immediately spent by the Government and mostly domestically. Result is that people are employed by the Government (estimate is that a billion in Government spending is 32,000 jobs), they spend money to employ people elsewhere, the money is re-injected into the economy and transformed into things like roads and bridges (that don't fall in for lack of maintenance).
On the other hand, cutting taxes shrinks Government (the real reason the Right loves tax cuts so much). Fewer people earn wages, more Wal-Marts get built to provide more Chinese goods to the underpaid and the economy generally suffers.
If you also take it on faith that Government is by definition bad, you probably don't mind that jobs are lost when the Government loses revenue. Nothing I can do about it except, again, refer you to Hebrews.
TAGS: Taxes, Employment, Conventional Wisdom, Republican Lies
No comments:
Post a Comment