Adults Only.
McClatchy's Kevin G. Hall writes one for the grownups...
At a time when Washington is wrestling with how to end federal budget deficits and trim the national debt — huge questions that are expected to dominate the nation's politics through the 2012 elections — the fact that Americans are under-taxed compared with U.S. historic norms is central to the discussion.In fact, if you can remember a time when things were better, you're doubtless thinking of a time when taxes were higher.
A slight quibble - that fact that certainly should be central to the discussion, since it's essential to the solution, but I'm afraid Mr. Hall's maturity is largely absent in the forums where the discussion leads to decisions.
Always nice to see the truth in print, though...
posted by Shaun at
9:50 PM
1 Comments:
Tax rates were amongst their highest when Dwight David Eisenhower was president - a Republican, as it happens. Of course, "Ike," as he was nicknamed, was so middle-of-the-road that both the Democrats and Republicans wanted to run him as theirs in the 1952 election; from what one reads.
Of course, things were also good in the 1950s, since it was, as the late David Halberstam put it, the high point of the "American Century" as he called that time. When most of the world's manufacturing facilities had been bombed, the Big P/X was the place you got most everything; and wages were good enough, people in the States could buy the things that were being made. When Detroit sold 9 million autos in 1955, people were amazed.
But sadly, those days are probably gone, no matter what happens to tax rates. Every empire has its day. We're probably just following the trajectory of Britain, the last big empire upon which the sun did eventually set.
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