Molly Ivins February 11AUSTIN — I'm not a campaign consultant, but the lack of ept in the Republican Party is so dire that it's a patriotic challenge for us all. We can't have potential presidents running around in a campaign this ridiculous. It's making the whole nation look bad. These are the times that try women's souls. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. And other stuff like that. Let me offer just a few helpful hints to our Republican brethren, who are making a total hash of their primary. 1. Bringing back supply-side economics: Not A Good Idea. We realize that all R's wish to associate themselves with their sainted Ronald Reagan, the Smilin' Gipper, Honey-I-Forgot-to-Duck, the Great Chuckler, the twinkly eyed fellow we all liked so well. Look, just because Reagan was a hard guy to dislike doesn't mean we want to repeat his mistakes, the most notable of which was adding $2 trillion to the national debt. Hell, if we didn't have to pay interest on the debt created by Reagan, we could balance the budget right now, without any of the cuts proposed by Republicans. Let me run that one by you again: The budget-cutting Bill Clinton has already done plus no additional debt from Reagan equals a balanced budget today. No cutting Medicare, Head Start, school lunches, summer jobs for poor kids, prenatal care, child nutrition, aid to disabled children, earned income tax credit for the working poor, college loans, aid to education, AmeriCorps, etc., etc. We dumbed our way into this pickle once, and no one wants to do it again. Look, supply-side economics is and always was a crock. You cannot cut taxes, increase spending and balance the budget. You cannot even cut taxes, not increase spending and balance the budget. Got it? It does not work. The reason we know it doesn't work is because we tried it, and it didn't. It cost us $2 trillion to learn that lesson. Two trillion is enough. 2. The flat tax is dumb and bad. Bob Dole correctly called it "snake oil," and that's just what it is. The two guys who dreamed it up are Professors Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka of Stanford University, and here, in their words, is the root of the problem: "It is an obvious mathematical law that lower taxes on the successful will have to be made up by higher taxes on average people." Hold that thought. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or pie in the sky.
"It is an obvious mathematical law that lower taxes on the successful will have to be made up by higher taxes on average people." Let's cut the crap here: Anyone who tells you that a flat tax will reduce taxes on middle-income Americans is a lying SOB, and that's the flat truth. And this is not to mention the further problem with Steve Forbes' flat-tax plan, which is that it taxes only wages and pensions and does not tax unearned income — the interest that rich people get from stocks and bonds — at all. Putting the words "fair" and "flat tax" in the same sentence is an obscenity. Under a flat tax, you and your wife make $60,000 a year by busting your butts for salary, and you pay taxes on it; a guy who has $60,000 a year from inheriting money and lives off the interest pays nothing. That is not fair. Fair is if you've been real fortunate in this country, you pay a little more. That's fair. And what we try to do with the little more you pay is give everyone else an opportunity to be fortunate, too. 3. Trickle-down economics does not work. We proved this by trying it not once, but twice — and from different sides. In the 1980s, under Reagan, the rich got richer, but it didn't trickle down. The poor got poorer, and the middle class was stuck with stagnant wages. The R's claim that trickle-down created jobs — "the most incredible job-creating machine the world has ever seen," said one Reagan adviser. Flat wrong. Here are the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics regarding job growth per year: Johnson: 3.8 percent, Carter: 3.1 percent, Clinton: 2.4 percent, Kennedy: 2.3 percent, Nixon: 2.3 percent, Reagan: 2.1 percent, and Bush: 0.6 percent. Reagan was full a percentage point behind Jimmy Carter, who was stuck with stagflation! Now, what happened when Clinton reversed Reagan's policy and raised taxes on the rich? Did the sky fall? Did the economy crash? Was William F. Buckley's National Review correct when it predicted, "If history is any guide, the (Clinton) tax increase aimed at the nation's most productive citizens will dampen investment, reduce national savings, slow business and job creation and most importantly fail to add a penny of revenues to the federal Treasury." Wrong on every count. Since Clinton raised taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans, investment has gone up 18 percent a year, national savings have gone up 18 percent as a share of the national economy, 1.2 million new businesses have started, 6 million new jobs have been created, and Treasury revenues have gone up by 13 percent. (Thanks to the people who did the research for James Carville's new book, "We're Right, They're Wrong." All sources are footnoted therein.) *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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