By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The insane illogic of their entire economic program notwithstanding, Amerikkka’s Republican Teabaggers seem aggressively intent on ramming their lunacy down the country’s throat – even if it means totally crushing every last member of the Other 99 Percent – the poor, the working class and the middle class.
Numerous independent studies have been conducted in recent years – including a massive new study by the moderate Brookings Institution released just this week – of government taxation policies and their effects on private-sector investment.
Not one credible study has ever found one iota of evidence that taxing capital gains at a lower rate than earned income – or reducing taxes for corporations and/or the wealthy – has ever had the result of increasing private-sector investment in the domestic economy.
On the contrary, however, there is ample evidence not only that low tax rates on corporations and the wealthy directly cause massive government deficits but also tend to actually reduce private-sector domestic investment.
Tax rates on capital gains and on the income of corporations and the wealthy have fallen steadily in Amerikkka for over 30 years – since the onset of the grotesque economic monstrosity affectionately known as “Reaganomics.”
But has private-sector domestic investment by these pampered parasites grown accordingly? It certainly has not.
Most new investment by these pampered Amerikkkan parasites has been outside of Amerikkka.
They have literally used these never-ending tax-cut windfalls to kill millions of high-paying Amercan working-class and middle-class jobs and ship production to ultra-low-wage Third-World countries.
At this moment, Amerikkka is suffering from the highest level of real unemployment it has experienced since the Great Depression of the Dirty Thirties – and this unconscionably high level of unemployment has now lasted for four years.
But are Amerikkka’s pampered parasites – the millionaires, mega-millionaires, billionaires and mega-billionaires and the blatantly criminal and corrupt capitalist corporations they control – investing to create new, high-wage jobs in Amerikkka? Absolutely not.
Amerikkka’s multinational capitalist corporations are currently sitting on more than $4 TRILLION in cash reserves, which they steadfastly refuse to invest in Amerikkka.
A single one of those corporations – Apple – is sitting on $98 billion in cash reserves.
True, in the last few days Apple has reveavled some vague, airy-fairy plans to use some of that money, including “spending” $45 billion in the next few years.
But how many new, high-wage jobs will even Apple create in Amerikkka? My bet is: Very few.
It is time for Amerikkka to bring back the truly progressive tax policies of the distant past that gave the country the greatest prosperity in its history.
It is time to tax capital gains not at half the rate of earned income, as is the case now, but at twice the rate of earned income. (Income that comes from “owning” is much less meritorious than income that comes from “earning” and deserves to be taxed at a much higher rate.)
It is time to bring back a very progressive income-tax schedule that increases the taxes of everyone earning more than $100,000 a year and especially on those making more than a million a year and especially, especially on everyone raking in much more than a million a year.
It is time to permanently close more than 99.99999% of the loopholes in the Amerikkkan tax code.
It is time to make everyone pay their fair share of taxes.
But the largely illiterate Republican Teabaggers – and their largely illiterate KKKristian kkkonservative kin – are so committed to exclusively serving the vested interests of their billionaires masters – thanks to the brainwashing they get from Fox News, the gaggle of semi-literate right-wing radio talk-show idiots and their local preacher-in-the-pulpit – that it will probably never happen.
After all, Amerikkka has – by far – the highest rate of functional illiteracy in the industrialized world.