many protesters implicitly assume that that the deficit has increased solely as a result of Barack Obama's policies. But in fact, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion this year back in January, before any of Obama's policies had been enacted, and a cumulative deficit of $4.3 trillion through 2019. (CBO made no assumptions about what his policies might be in making its projection.) Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
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This is a calm, responsible, cut-and-dry look at how Americans are taxed and whether some citizens' outrage is ill-placed. The author eschews partisan talk of taxes, and uses factual data to show that taxes are not, in fact, unusually high in this country.
I strongly suspect that many of those that loudly denounced the Obama stimulus package for its impact on the deficit would have cheered the McCain stimulus package even ... More »
Informative commentary about U.S. taxes by Bruce Bartlett, former Treasury Department economist. The author makes a reasonable argument to suggest that Americans aren't more heavily taxed now than in earlier years, and that the recent tax protests are not grounded on factual evidence. To back his point, he cites Tax Policy Center data showing that the federal income tax rate has decreased by nearly half since before the Reagan tax cut to 5.9%. While this overview doesn't cover all ... More »
The problem with this article is the same as most articles about taxation. It looks at ONE of the hundreds of ways that Americans are taxed and concludes we're not overtaxed. What about unemployment taxes, property taxes, vehicle excise taxes, sales taxes, etc.? My personal income tax burden is about 16%. But when I include all these other taxes, it zooms well past 30%. Without the rest of this data, the article is meaningless.
Personally I would not reject tax-cuts in a recession.