Amity Shlaes - Lousy Lawmakers

Amity Shlaes

You can have low taxes, or you can have an economic recovery, but you can’t have both. That’s the message the administration is hammering this summer. Democrats argue in particular that extending the George W. Bush rate cuts on people in the top tax brackets will damage the budget to such an extent that our economy will suffer.

Tim Geithner

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, for example, said that sustaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would “hurt economic recovery by undermining confidence that we are prepared to make a commitment today to bring down our future deficits.” Some centrists, and even a few conservatives, are talking a similar line. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan went further recently, saying all the Bush tax cuts, even those for lower earners, should expire as scheduled at year’s end, since it is wrong to live “on borrowed money.”
The argument that we have to choose between keeping the Bush rates on the one hand and achieve an economic recovery on the other is hypocritical. You know that’s true because our leaders aren’t alleging the same trade-off when it comes to federal expenditures.
The tax cuts Geithner would like to see expire, those for top earners, cost taxpayers by his own estimate $700 billion over 10 years. Plenty of other items in the federal budget cost $700 billion over 10 years, or a much shorter period. Yet you don’t hear the administration positing apocalyptically that those outlays will darken the future. Only lower tax rates can hurt us, Democrats want us to believe. Read more here:

Amity Shlaes - Lousy Lawmakers