Wall Street Journal

There is an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal today titled Rising Tide - Tax cuts are good for everyone--and everyone knows it but Washington Democrats.

John F. Kennedy believed that "an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits." So he proposed income tax rate reductions, which the Democratic Congress enacted the year after JFK's death. Back then, Democrats were for them: more than 80% of Democratic senators and representatives voted for the Kennedy tax cuts.

Oh yes, times have certainly changed. The late President Kennedy's own brother has forgotten just how much tax cuts helps the economy.

Opposing tax cuts has become the mantra of the liberal left. Sen. John Kerry wants to roll back Bush's "unaffordable tax cuts." Senator Mark Dayton (D., Minn.) called the cuts "dangerous and destructive and dishonorable." Bill Clinton in 2003 said the cuts were "way too big to avoid serious harm." And various New York Times editorials called them "economically unsound," claimed that "they will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars" and said they were unlikely "to stimulate the wallowing economy." Earlier this month House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi promised that the election of a Democratic House in November would result in a "rollback of the tax cuts."

If President Bush proposes, the Democrats oppose. It doesn't matter if the President was right or not, as hind sight should tell them. When there is more money in your pocket, you will be able to spend more. If you spend more, there will be more jobs created. It's such a simple plan, yet the Democrats don't WANT you to have more money in your pocket, they want it in THEIR pocket, to spend on programs to support those who won't get any money in their pockets through working.

In the 2 1/4 years before the 2003 tax cuts, economic growth averaged 1.1% annually; in the three years since it has averaged 4% per year, and in the first quarter of this year it was 5.6% on an annualized basis. Inflation-adjusted per capita GDP has grown 7.8% from 2003 through the first quarter of this year.

Now, if we could just get members of both parties, in both houses, to quit spending our money on redundant programs, most of which do not work, we, as a nation, would be a whole lot better off than we are right now, fiscally.

State governments are coming to the same conclusions. Rhode Island Democrats came to realize their 9.9% top income tax rate--the third highest in the nation--was costing the state business and jobs, so they teamed up with their Republican governor to enact a flat-tax option: pay 7.5% (which phases down to 5.5% over time,) without deductions, instead of 9.9% with them.

Wisconsin's administration must have been in the wrong room when this came up.

To paraphrase JFK, tax rate reduction is indeed a rising tide that lifts all individuals to greater opportunity.

Yup!