Bush’s tax cut only for the rich
National debt may never be paid off under new proposal

To members of Congress, all I have to say is this: Don’t do it.

I know it is tempting. This isn’t 1981 again, you tell yourself. We have surpluses as far as the eye can see. Surely those Reagan-era budget deficits won’t happen again, you say.

Control yourself.

Don’t jump on the tax cut bandwagon.

Just say no to Bush’s tax cut plan.

It is unfair and it is risky.

Let’s take a look at how much working families are going to save under a Bush tax cut.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, a married couple with $30,000 a year in taxable income would save nothing under a Bush tax cut. That is not a typo. Zero. Nada. Zip.

A single filer making $20,000 a year in taxable income wouldn’t get a dime of tax relief, either. The people who need it the most, don’t get any tax relief. Single filers making $5,000 a year (like many students here) will get $250 in tax savings.

Gee, thanks George.

Ralph Nader offered the poor Universal Health Care, a substantial raise in the minimum wage and an attempt to make the tax structure more progressive (a fancy word for meaning he would have cut taxes for the poor and raised them on the rich). Al Gore also offered an increase in the minimum wage and a slew of targeted tax cuts directed at the middle and lower classes.

Granted, most couples make more than $30,000 a year, but they are not in need of tax cuts as much. And it is true that many low-income filers would be put off the tax rolls all together in the Bush tax plan. But the tax cuts the average filer gets are nothing compared to what very wealthy filers get.

A couple making $60,000 a year would save $1,800 a year in taxes, according the magazine. Not bad. But look how much a couple making $120,000 a year saves: $7,200.

Riddle me this: Why should a family making twice as much a year get four times the amount of tax relief?

The fabulously rich save even more under the plan. Not only are their tax brackets substantially reduced, but they also benefit from the gradual elimination of the estate tax as proposed in the plan. The elimination of the so-called “death tax” will only benefit a small (and very rich) portion of the population, and doesn’t help the single working mothers of the country one bit.

The conservative defense of giving bigger tax cuts for the rich has always been: “Well, they pay more taxes.” Duh. They make more money. Of course they pay more taxes.

Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Ted Turner are not exactly starving for tax relief. And they shouldn’t be given a tax cut at the risk of eliminating the surplus in the future.

Budget surplus projections are exactly that, projections. They are usually inaccurate. When Reagan pushed his massive tax cut in 1981, he promised that it would spur the economy enough to eventually balance the budget in 1984. As we all know, Reagan ran budget deficits the likes of which this country has never seen before. It took two large tax hikes (one by the elder George Bush and another by Bill Clinton) and cuts in defense spending to eventually balance the budget in 1997.

Recent history at the state level also shows how faulty projections can be. In the mid-1990s, with state treasuries swelling, state after state went on tax cutting sprees.

Now, according to a Feb. 12 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “In some states, lawmakers are dealing with outright fiscal emergencies.

Others are dealing with cutbacks and creative financing to balance the books as the nations economy slows. In Texas, one state senator’s solution to the revenue crunch would have the Legislature undo tax cuts that Bush championed as governor.”

The states miscalculated, and as a result are swimming in red ink. In North Carolina, lawmakers are faced with a $740,000 deficit, the article reported.

This is not to say that we do not need a tax cut. A tax cut to the lower and middle class could help spur the economy. But we had the greatest economic boom in our nation’s history under the current tax rates. To say that it is high taxes that caused the current economic slowdown is not true.

A huge tax cut will make it difficult to invest more in education, health care and social programs. More importantly, it will make it harder (if not impossible) to pay down the national debt.

We have a golden opportunity to pay off the national debt within the next 10 to 15 years. A sudden rush to cut taxes because the economy has slowed in the short term hurts our economy in the long run.

Just say no.

Brandon Ortiz is a freshman news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth.
He can be reached at (b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu).

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