Thursday, May 25, 2006

May 20 Tax Cut Letter

Here is a link to a letter which appeared in the Deseret News recently. I will reprint it here as well:

This week, President Bush signed into law another tax cut — some $70 billion — that ensures that deficit spending will increase, simply because the conservative idea that tax cuts cause spending to dry up is wrong. The strongly anti-government Cato Institute recently reported that, since 1981, every $1 in tax cuts led to 15 cents of extra spending, whereas every $1 of tax hikes reduced spending by 15 cents. The data unequivocally demonstrate that conservatives have it backwards and that their ideas are nonsense.

Robert Hildebrand
Salt Lake City


I sent a reply today:

In his recent letter, Robert Hildebrand stated that according to the "strongly anti-government" Cato Institute, cutting taxes is a bad idea. I have to admit that this caught my attention and piqued my curiosity. So I looked up the Cato Institute and found this quote from their opinion piece at www.cato.org regarding President Bush's first tax cut in 2001:

"The way for taxpayers to protect themselves is to put strict rules on the government’s power to tax and spend. We should require the federal government to balance its budget so we never again run up deficits like those of the 1980s and 1990s. And we should reach that balance by slashing federal spending and closing certain federal departments. Also, we should cut taxes now, by more than the Bush administration proposes."

Mr. Hildebrand was right, we should have listened to the Cato Institute.

2 comments:

Ashlee said...

maybe we should just get a king to tell us what to do all the time and we never get a say.

Cameron said...

You know, historically "good" kings have been great for their countries. It's just that little problem of the crappy kings. They seem to like to raise taxes and imprison people for not paying them. Wait, that sounds familiar.....