With their economic disaster left in our laps, Republicans are offering rinsed policies while fighting Obama’s stimulus.
Although tax cuts are included in Obama’s initial stimulus package, this chart shows (in orange) that insisting on tax cuts alone will fail.
The upcoming White House proposals (in blue) will provide 6 times more employment than the errors of the storming Republican opponents, and include targeted tax cuts rather than merely re-washed trickle-down.
A quite plausible alternative, which is partially present in the president-elect’s proposal, is for the fiscal stimulus to primarily take the form of payroll tax cuts for poor and middle-income Americans. Those are, after all, the people who are most likely to spend the money quickly.
Targeted tax aid for poorer Americans would be far more egalitarian than most kinds of infrastructure spending, like broadband technology. Sensible infrastructure projects wouldn’t disproportionately employ the least-skilled Americans. Forgoing the payroll tax for households earning less than $75,000 a year is surer progressivism than bridge-building.
