12-12-2021, 08:54 AM
It must be pointed out that Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America was written in 1996.
A great deal has changed since then.
But back to the original post/video: Just as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz was "worse than the other one" (the Wicked Witch of the East), so was the second "Reagan tax cut" of 1986 (hypocritically co-sponsored by two Democrats - Dick Gephardt in the House and "Dollar Bill" Bradley in the Senate) worse than the other one, in that it raised the bottom income tax rate from 11% to 15% (thus negating, and then some, the 14%-to-11% cut in that rate included in the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill of 1981) while concomitantly slashing the top rate from 50% to 28%.
In 2001, George W. Bush at least had both the compassion and the common sense to correct this injustice, and then some, by not only creating a new 10% bottom income tax rate, but making it retroactive to the previous tax year, resulting in those $300 checks getting sent out to the vast majority of Americans (the Bush tax bill did, of course, cut the the first three of the top four tax brackets by 3% each, and the top bracket by 4.6% - but hey, what did you expect?).
Now, fast-forward to 2017, when the new "tax-cut bill" was being debated: In its original draft, not only was the bottom income tax rate going to be raised from 10% to 12%, but the head-of-household status was going to be eliminated, thus slapping a "slut tax" on single parents with children, nearly all of them single mothers. However, a huge public outcry - and the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate (!) - forced Trump to delete both of these provisions from the final draft which got passed.
A great deal has changed since then.
But back to the original post/video: Just as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz was "worse than the other one" (the Wicked Witch of the East), so was the second "Reagan tax cut" of 1986 (hypocritically co-sponsored by two Democrats - Dick Gephardt in the House and "Dollar Bill" Bradley in the Senate) worse than the other one, in that it raised the bottom income tax rate from 11% to 15% (thus negating, and then some, the 14%-to-11% cut in that rate included in the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill of 1981) while concomitantly slashing the top rate from 50% to 28%.
In 2001, George W. Bush at least had both the compassion and the common sense to correct this injustice, and then some, by not only creating a new 10% bottom income tax rate, but making it retroactive to the previous tax year, resulting in those $300 checks getting sent out to the vast majority of Americans (the Bush tax bill did, of course, cut the the first three of the top four tax brackets by 3% each, and the top bracket by 4.6% - but hey, what did you expect?).
Now, fast-forward to 2017, when the new "tax-cut bill" was being debated: In its original draft, not only was the bottom income tax rate going to be raised from 10% to 12%, but the head-of-household status was going to be eliminated, thus slapping a "slut tax" on single parents with children, nearly all of them single mothers. However, a huge public outcry - and the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate (!) - forced Trump to delete both of these provisions from the final draft which got passed.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892