Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin posted the following articles by Thomas Sowell on her Facebook page December 6th.
Fiscal Cliff Notes as published at Townhall:
Amid all the political and media hoopla about the "fiscal cliff" crisis, there are a few facts that are worth noting.
First
of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on "the rich,"
even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government's
financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top two
percent will not get enough additional tax revenue to run the government
for ten days.
And what will the government do to pay for the other 355 days in the year?
All
the political angst and moral melodrama about getting "the rich" to pay
"their fair share" is part of a big charade. This is not about
economics, it is about politics. Taxing "the rich" will produce a drop
in the bucket when compared to the staggering and unprecedented deficits
of the Obama administration.
No previous administration in the
entire history of the nation ever finished the year with a trillion
dollar deficit. The Obama administration has done so every single year.
Yet political and media discussions of the financial crisis have been
focused overwhelmingly on how to get more tax revenue to pay for past
and future spending.
The very catchwords and phrases used by the
Obama administration betray how phony this all is. For example, "We
are just asking the rich to pay a little more."
This is an insult
to our intelligence. The government doesn't "ask" anybody to pay
anything. It orders you to pay the taxes they impose and you can go to
prison if you don't.
Then there are all the fancy substitute
words for plain old spending-- words like "stimulus" or "investing in
the industries of the future."
The theory about "stimulus" is
that government spending will stimulate private businesses and financial
institutions to put more of their money into the economy, speeding up
the recovery. But the fact that you call something a "stimulus" does
not make it a stimulus.
Stimulus spending began during the
Bush administration and has continued full blast during the Obama
administration. But the end result is that both businesses and
financial institutions have had record amounts of their own money
sitting idle. The rate of circulation of money slowed down. All this
is the opposite of stimulus. More
Fiscal Cliff Notes: Part 2 as published at Townhall:
One of the big advantages that President Obama has, as he plays
"chicken" with the Congressional Republicans along the "fiscal cliff,"
is that Obama is a master of the plausible lie, which will never be
exposed by the mainstream media-- nor, apparently, by the Republicans.
A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered,
is that President Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" cost the government so
much lost tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit-- so that
the government cannot afford to allow the cost of letting the Bush tax
rates continue for "the rich."
It sounds very plausible, and constant repetition without a challenge
may well be enough to convince the voting public that, if the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives does not go along with
Barack Obama's demands for more spending and higher tax rates on the top
2 percent, it just shows that they care more for "the rich" than for
the other 98 percent.
What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false
Obama's argument is. That also makes it completely inexplicable why the
Republicans have not done so.
The official statistics which show plainly how wrong Barack Obama is
can be found in his own "Economic Report of the President" for 2012, on
page 411. You can look it up.
You may be able to find a copy of the "Economic Report of the
President" for 2012 at your local public library. Or you can buy a hard
copy from the Government Printing Office or download an electronic
version from the Internet.
For those who find that "a picture is worth a thousand words," they
need only see the graphs published in the November 30th issue of
Investor's Business Daily.
What both the statistical tables in the "Economic Report of the
President" and the graphs in Investor's Business Daily show is that (1)
tax revenues went up-- not down-- after tax rates were cut during the
Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after
year, after the cut in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for
increasing the deficit.
Indeed, the New York Times reported in 2006: "An unexpectedly steep
rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down
the projected budget deficit this year."
While the New York Times may not have expected this, there is nothing
unprecedented about lower tax rates leading to higher tax revenues,
despite automatic assumptions by many in the media and elsewhere that
tax rates and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction.
They do not.
The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by
making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax
rates move in the same direction. More
