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Commentary - Aviva Aron-Dine: Dividend, capital gains cuts didn’t help economy
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WASHINGTON (Map, News) - With the fourth anniversary of the 2003 capital gains and dividend tax cuts just past and the Office of Management and Budget’s Mid-Session Review just ahead, supporters of making these tax cuts permanent are reiterating their claim that the tax cuts boosted the economy and increased federal revenues.
For example, a release from the Senate Republican Policy Committee contends that the tax cuts “contributed to today’s strong pro-growth economy” and “have also led to a surge in tax receipts” and that allowing these tax cuts to expire as scheduled would “have devastating consequences for the economy.”
Claims like these raise three basic questions. First, has the economic and revenue growth of the past few years really been unusually strong? Second, are there good reasons to think that the capital gains and dividend tax cuts caused whatever economic and revenue growth has occurred, as opposed to just coinciding with it? Third, would extending these tax cuts boost economic and revenue growth on a longer-term basis?
The last four years of data, as well as some important new academic research, suggest that the answer to each of these questions is no.
You can read the rest of this study on the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities Web site at: www.cbpp.org/7-10-07tax.htm
Comments from Examiner Readers
10:53 AM MST on Fri., Jul. 20, 2007 re: "Pietro S. Nivola: Uncle Sam suffering from attention deficit disorder"
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4:57 AM MST on Wed., May. 9, 2007
re: "Sunlight study sees 10 ways to open the House"
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Mr. Mirth Alert said:
Mr. Nivola should thank the Lord that he's allowed to put his ignorance on public display, for he knows little about division of labor & nothing about attention deficit disorder. Division of labor was a mfr.'ing scheme, to produce more for less, i.e., increase profit. Despite Mr. Mellon's early 20th-century claim that good govt. is good business, govt. neither mfrs. nor turns a profit. & This notion of doing a little of everything need not be explained by some questionable medical diagnosis but rather by the very dictum that got the guy who appointed all the policy makers elected: "I can please all of the people all of the time." Overstretched govt. is the product of deliberate planning, not some behavioral miscue.
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Examiner Reader said:
Sorry, but this Open House Project commentary reads like an Onion parody column: who @the Sunlight Fdn. sincerely believes that Congress has any interest in empowering the public? The gulf betw. haves & have-nots widens a little more each day, & as "haves" Congress sure as shootin' has nothing to gain by reducing that gulf. Never mind all this techno nonsense, Sunlight Fdn.: arrest members of Congress & detain them for 48 hr; if for no reason other than to shake it outta its "have" stupor.
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