Taxes

Tax cuts for the rich. Give back to middle-class Americans. This is Obama's stump.

This is why I don't believe it.

First: The tax cuts were mostly for corporations. The US corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world. That means if you want to run a company it would cost you more to do it here than Ireland, which has a lower corporate tax. If your a global company.... what would you do? You would do what any good company should do and lower your costs of doing business. That means these companies take their jobs overseas to do business cheaper. That means jobs go overseas. Which means a worse economy here.

Obama wants to roll back those tax breaks and give them to middle class. Which means that we would lose even more jobs in the poor economy that we have and that the middle class would actually be worse off. The problem of his argument is that the middle class doesn't really pay much in taxes anyways. So in reality the government would keep more of the taxes while claiming to help out average Americans. This means less money in the economy and poor economic growth.

"Middle class Americans pay lots of taxes!" you say. Ummmm no not really. 42% of Americans pay no taxes at all. In fact the top 5% wage earners pay over 60% of our taxes. The top 20% pay 95% of our taxes.

"Well, they are rich, so they need to be taxed more" you say. Yes and no. They should pay their fair share, but you have to remember that taxes don't create more jobs. Money in the hands of consumers creates more jobs. The more you tax the wealthy the less they spend, which means that again.... economic slow down.

Raising taxes is risky even in a positive economic environment. Doing so in an economic downturn would be a disaster. Remember that while you think about who to vote for...