Been worried Obama and the Spendocrats will raise taxes and really mess up the economy? Well, silly of you to worry. For without lifting a finger, Obama and his pals in Congress can make taxes go up. As Pete DuPont reminds us in today's Wall Street Journal:
[N]ext year there will also be substantial tax increases for a great many Americans. The first reason will be the expiration of the Bush tax cuts . The top personal income tax rate will rise next Jan. 1 to 39.6% from 35%, a hike of nearly one-eighth. The dividend tax rate will rise to 39.6%, more than 2½ times the current 15%. And the capital gains tax rate will rise by a third, to 20% from 15%. If the House health care bill had passed, all three of these rates would have risen to 45%.
(Forty-five percent! Almost half of what a person makes.)
And if Congress does nothing, the death tax (a/k/a the Estate Tax) will be zero this year and then zoom back up to 50% next year.
Meanwhile taxes are going up because some deductions have expired and Congress hasn't seen fit to extend them (notice a pattern, a law, regulation, or tax is permanent, tax relief is temporary):
[A] number of last year's tax deductions have disappeared due to the failure of Congress to extend them into this year. The tax deduction for state and local sales taxes is one; the deduction for college tuition and fees is another; and the 50% write-off for small businesses for capital purchases--equipment, machinery or building a new plant--has disappeared as well, which will have a negative effect upon the construction of new business operation facilities.
Add in the wanton spending going on in Washington D.C. and you have a recipe for economic disaster:
[A]s economist Arthur Laffer wrote in his January Economic Outlook, we "cannot have a prosperous economy when government is overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over-regulating and restricting the free flow of goods and services across national boundaries." We are, in his words, simply "moving in the wrong direction."
The Obama Administration and the Spendocrat Congress are doing everything exactly wrong. Scott Brown's election sent the message that the American people know it, too (even in "Taxachusetts"). We have to keep sending that message, right through November of this year.
Comments