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President Obama has come out with another stimulus package (just don't call it that), and like so many other stimulus packages over the past three decades, it is long on tax cuts and short on actual stimulus.
It has been known for decades that tax cuts and tax credits are the least effective form of stimulus in the economic toolchest. In reality, tax cuts are little more than another way of transferring wealth up the socioeconomic ladder.
Yet after launching a stimulus package that consisted of forty percent tax cuts last year, a stimulus package that wasn't terribly stimulating, Obama and the Dems are ready to double down on this failed strategy one more time, only this time the stimulus package is going to consist of over 70% tax cuts and tax credits
This tax cut mania started under Reagan, and virtually every president since has followed his lead. It has been proven a failure time and again, and in fact it has greatly contributed to how we have gotten to where we are now, the most unequal developed nation in the world, with a massive debt and with little being spent to help the ordinary people in this country. When will we learn that tax cuts and tax credits don't help out the economy or the ordinary person so much as they help corporations and the elite?
We cannot continue to follow the failed policies of past administrations and expect to drag this economy out of the ditch we're in. Furthermore, how are we going to continue to fund public services, education, social services and the rest of the obligations of a modern state if we continue to slash the revenue needed to meet our obligations?
We are at a dire point in our history, deep into an economic disaster with little financial wiggle room to try and get ourselves out. Therefore it is of highest importance that we get the most bang out of our buck when government tries to jump start the economy. This means that we need to start proposing the most effective of economic stimulus plans, namely straight up jobs creation. It also means that we need to, for now, toss the least effective of economic stimuli, tax cuts and tax credits, onto the dust heap of history. We simply can't afford them at this point.
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