The top earners in NYC already pay 47.14%, almost 50% of their income in taxes. I think that’s quite enough for the government to survive on.

Individuals earning 32,550-78,850 per year in NYC pay 35.75% of their income in taxes leaving those earning, say 35,000 per year with $22,500 to live on. An apartment will easily cost you $1,200/month or $14,400/year. So you are left with $8,100 for everything else.

Increasing taxes will fuck up the economy and depress our standard of living further. Just because you are angry about the Iraq war is no reason to substitute one stupidity with another.

It was also the central argument of the speech President Kennedy delivered to the Economic Club of New York on December 14, 1962. The purpose of this speech was to make a case for a reduction of federal tax rates. The tax cuts were necessary, Kennedy insisted, to boost federal tax revenues, to balance the federal budget, and to increase spending in the private sector which the previous high tax regime of the late 1950s was incapable of doing.

A drastic revamp of the federal tax structure was necessary, Kennedy argued, because of the ballooning federal deficit and the general malaise central government spending—a result of high tax rates—puts into broad economic spending. True, post World War II this country saw a economic boom. But this was due almost entirely to a sudden ramp-up of government spending in national security and war marking endeavors.

It also stifled free market innovation. Thus, when the threat of the very heights of the cold war were over, generally around 1955, and we moved more toward containment than aggression, we found our economy unable to respond. Whereas defense contracts could build tanks, they couldn’t necessarily produce butter. The result was a period of economic contraction through the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s. The American economy relied so heavily on war-time government spending, it was unable to provide for peace time prosperity.

“I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last five years that our present tax system, developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incenitives [sic] for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.”

So, it was at the end of 1963 that Kennedy saw the need for a great change in the United States. He sought to increase Americas proficiency in the following areas:
• education and technical training
• civilian research and technology
• doctorates in mathematics, engineering, and physics
• the development of our natural resources.

But where did Kennedy seek funding for these endeavors? “[T]he most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and investment demand — to cut the fetters which hold back private spending.”

“The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system.”

And it is in President Kennedy’s words I find my argument. A government should be fiscally responsible. This includes fiscal responsibility to its citizens through taxation and through spending. A combination of the two creates benefits and opportunities to all.

Thus, I respectively disagree with the assertion, “High tax rates have very often coincided with great prosperity. “

In “LOWER TAXES AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: RESPONSE TO A FLAWED ANALYSIS By Iris J. Lav and Kim S. Rueben, writing in Center on Budget and Policy Priorities state “Most researchers find that reduced taxes can modestly spur economic growth. But the effect is quite small, and depends on holding expenditures on public services constant— which rarely is possible in the real world. And researchers also find that state expenditures on education, infrastructure, highways, and public health matter as much or more than taxes in determining economic growth rates. Reduced taxes that are accompanied by reductions in spending on services that benefit the economy and businesses can have a negative effect on economic growth.”

During the Bush years there has been a combination of reductions in taxation combined with reductions in spending that benefit the economy. The result of this has been the most anemic economic recovery on record and currently what may be an incipient recession. Throughout the Bush years there has been a decline in the earnings of the middle class and the lower middle classes. Tax reductions can obviously be beneficial to the nation, but not when combined with an out of control war and wild spending on non essentials (such as the bridge to nowhere in Alaska).

Despite what the Heritage Institute says, there are more factors which determine what is good for the economy then those that are discussed by their studies. Tax reductions, no matter how good they are for high earners, are no panacea for America.