From the Bar©
In the March 22nd issue of The New Republic, Noam Scheiber touches on something that relates to tax-cuts and job loss. Warning: economic policy discussion ahead. Do not try this at home.Scheiber is discussing the classic criticisms of the Bushies tax cuts.
Liberals in Congress and at think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute offer three basic critiques: that the Bushies should have targeted the bulk of their tax cuts toward the working poor and middle class, who would have been more likely to spend their tax savings than more affluent beneficiaries ... [but] there is increasing evidence that affluent people spend a higher proportion of their income than economic models have traditionally predicted.Now, as a devout, if lazy, student of the New Deal and the other great things that happened while Eleanor Roosevelt was president, this strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive
Or maybe not. The Association of Travel Marketing Executives has a report about how heavily they depend on the affluent, and specifically on business travel. In the American households earning $70,000 or more a year (17% of households), 96% travels. High-school janitors and cabbies don't take quite as many vacations. So perhaps the upper-class (as opposed to the rich) is very important to our consumer economy.
But that argument just emphasises the class system in America. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, chronicles live among those getting by on $6-8 an hour. I recommend Ehrenreich's book above a more 'scholarly' work because the economic facts are deceptively simple: the working poor comprise one in three Americans, and it's not easy for them to make ends meet. But Nickel and Dimed is a good way to get the fundamental truth behind that statistic.
And it changes the debate. The temporary economic problems imposed by the Bush administration, while bad (even in Scheiber's opinion), still ignore the existence of a significant class division in America. Liberals seem to be arguing that the tax cuts need to be targeted at the lower class in order to stimulate the economy. I would say that the economy is fundamentally flawed (or at least fundamentally unfair). There doesn't seem to be much point in arguing who should get the larger tax cut: the CEO of Citigroup or the woman who cleans his apartment. Either way, the CEO still earns more than three hundred million dollars a year, the maid still earns less than thirty thousand.
