On the recordDecember 16, 2010
When most people borrow money--and go into debt--it's either for survival or for an investment that will pay off in the future. Borrowing $114 billion from China to give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans meets neither of those goals. Over the last ten years, while economic growth has stalled and middle class wages have stagnated, the wealthy have been doing just fine. In fact, two-thirds of all the income gains made in this country over the last ten years have gone to the wealthiest one percent. And the top one percent now owns more financial wealth than the bottom 90 percent. They clearly don't need any more help to get ahead. This $114 billion tax giveaway to the rich is not an investment in our economy. Just look at what happened in the decade that followed the passage of these cuts in 2001. Even if you exclude the beginning of the recession, we saw the slowest economic growth since World War 2: fewer jobs created, fewer businesses started, fewer dollars injected into our economy. So where did all that money go? Into the bank accounts of the wealthiest few. When their taxes were cut, they banked three times as much money than before. More money was stashed away rather than--as some would have you believe--put into business expansion or job creation. That's why the Congressional Budget Office ranked an extension of these tax breaks LAST among the options we have to help grow the economy and create jobs.
