Entitlements and taxes

Talk radio 3/23/10: When President Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 28% those filthy rich people President Obama has such an animus for managed to put 21,000,000 unemployed people to work and revenues to the government doubled. Capital and employment go together - take it away from the free market and unemployment goes up.

President Kennedy did the same thing when he found that taxes had encroached to a very high level when he became President. He lowered the highest tax rate from 91% to a rate significantly lower and for lowest incomes from 20 to 14%. In each case unemployment went down and revenues to the government went up. It happened again when President Clinton adopted New Gingrich's Contract With America plan in 1994. President Bush's plan of cross-the-board lower taxes in 2003 brought about 46 months of economic growth and only slowed when the oil producing countries we placed our dependence on, instead of tapping our own vast natural resources, declared economic war on us in 2008. In spite of gradually driving the price of their oil up to $147 a barrel and putting a strain on every family budget and every industry unemployment in November 2008 was 6.5% - considerably lower than it is now.

It's not necessary to be an Ivy League scholar to know what works to revive the economy. All that's necessary is to look back at what worked to get there. But for those who would force us into Socialism, the way to do it is to deliberately destroy the economy and create the perception that only the government can be relied on to satisfy all our needs.

There's an old saying: "Money doesn't grow on trees." And neither does the money for the entitlements the Socialist politicians are so generously (?) bestowing on us - or are they just trying to create a dependency on them to feed their lust for power?

Entitlements can be like drugs. We glow in the elation of receiving them and then, like drugs, there are the after effects. With entitlements the after effects are that they have to be funded. And who is it that those funds come from? They have to be funded by the taxpayer that received the entitlement.

Some entitlements do make sense, such as unemployment insurance. But we can't be so heavily protected from every sling and arrow that come our way that we lose our incentive to go to work.