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Math 101: Cut Taxes, Run Surplus! Even in Wartime!

by John F. Tamburo, Editor in Chief, Publisher
Originally Posted: 1/12/2006 4:13:45 PM

War usually causes massive deficits.  In fact, in December 2005, the United States of America spent $230.9 Billion.  Pheesh!  That’s almost enough money for four venti Mochas at the local Starbucks!  Seriously, that is a record monthly expenditure.  So why the rosy title?  Simple.  We took in $241.88 billion!  We ran a surplus in December!  Now this isn’t normal.  In December 2004, we ran an $8 billion deficit.  Why a surplus now?  Did we sell ANWR to ExxonMobil?  Nope.  It’s actually simple.  Tax revenues rose.  Here’s Breitbart’s article.

According to liberals, the GOP is so busy kissing the posteriors of the wealthy by cutting their taxes that the country takes in no money at all, except from the poorest folk.  Anyone who can add, or for that matter use a calculator, should know better.  First of all, tax cuts will affect not the rich (those with hundreds of millions in trust funds, like Howard Dean or Ted Kennedy), but rather the productive (those who work their back ends off running small businesses).  We don’t tax piles of cash sitting banks; we tax income.  In fact, the top 50% of wage earners pay 96.54% of all income taxes.  While the left likes to characterize hard workers who get good pay as "the winners of life’s Lotto,"  we who actually work hard know better.  There is nothing Lotto-like in working your own business 80-100 hours per week, taking all of the risk, and then being punished by the government’s taking a huge bite of one’s paycheck.  Furthermore, those hard workers did not have the money to invest either in their businesses or the capital markets.  High taxes means less investment.  Less investment means fewer jobs.  Fewer jobs means economic recession.

"Our President inherited Bill Clinton’s recession.  That recession was the final outcome of Bill Clinton’s tax hikes, and the collapse of his hype-filled Internet stock bubble."

Our President inherited Bill Clinton’s recession.  That recession was the final outcome of Bill Clinton’s tax hikes, and the collapse of his hype-filled Internet stock bubble (which by the way did wonders for Howard Dean’s trust fund, based on the Dean Witter Reynolds stock brokerage).  It didn’t help that, almost immediately after he got into office, a pile of satanic terrorists attacked us.  Our wonderful, wise President pushed through aggressive tax cuts, and did not back off of them as we went to war.  Those tax cuts kept the stock collapse, as exacerbated by 9/11, from throwing us into a full-fledged depression.  Now, as the war has succeeded, and our security seems to be better provided for, the economy has launched off like a rocket.  In 2004, we saw a smaller-than-expected deficit as businesses flourished and paid more taxes on their higher profits.  More people are working, changing them from welfare or unemployment recipients into taxpayers; such a change is a double kiss to deficit reduction since one reduces spending and gains revenues.

That is the math that always works.  The Left does not like it because they think that they won’t be able to enact more vote-buying programs.  The American left attempts to buy off the public in the same manner that Julius Caesar bought off the plebs of Rome.  In fact, the Left thinks of itself as the patricians and everyone else as the plebs.  Bill Clinton was ribald in his assertion that the people couldn’t have a tax cut because they wouldn’t know how to "spend it right!"  But all of the class-warfare rhetoric of the Left cannot undo the slashed unemployment rate, or the December 2005 surplus, or any of the other good news that is coming out.  And the fact that the press is largely a mouthpiece for extreme elitist liberalism cannot mask good news when people look at their bank balances, and realize, "Gee, I’m not as bad off as CBS says I am!"

President Bush pledges to keep all tax cuts in place and halve the deficit by 2009.  Considering the economic growth we’re seeing, he is predicting conservatively.  He won’t have to do much to achieve that goal.  He could do some fairly straightforward cuts, and enact Social Security reform and still beat his pledge.  Let’s hope and pray he succeeds.