Thirty years ago, America embarked on a radical economic experiment. We were told that if we slashed taxes on the wealthy, the result would be an economic boom and that the wealth would trickle down to the rest of us. The first part of the experiment worked, the rich became fabulously wealthy. Writing for Slate.com, Timothy Noah explains that from 1980 to 2005, the richest 1% of Americans pocketed more than 80% of the total increase in income in this country.
If you’re wondering how the second part of the experiment worked, the part about the wealth trickling down to the rest of us, refer to the statistics listed above. But Republicans (and some Democrats) aren’t letting failure stop them from continuing down the same path they’ve followed for three decades. This week, Senate Republicans killed a measure that would reward companies for moving jobs back to America and punish companies that shipped US jobs overseas. Republicans have also obsessed over extending Bush-era tax cuts for the rich - cuts that would cost the Treasury $36 billion over the next decade according to some published reports.
How much more evidence does one need to be convinced that it's this failed experiment and the resulting concentration of wealth, not big government, that is the primary source of our woes? How much more evidence does one need to be convinced that a vote for politicians who seek to continue the experiment is a vote against one’s own self-interest?
The rest of the editorial:
http://www.freep.com/article/20100930/BLOG24/100930005/Unemployment-benefits-Enabling-our-own-destruction