The real question is, \"Were there ever really any republican tax cuts at all in the last 40 years?\"
No there weren't, and that means there were no Bush tax cuts, either. They were loans we were forced to take, that we still are paying interest on.
Interest on republican tax cuts is now the 4th largest expense the government pays, behind Social Security, Medicare, and the huge bloated military budget.
I'm trying to condense this argument down to a simple emotionally powerful soundbyte that will resonate enough with people so they understand just how bad these "tax cuts" are for the nation. Will you help me out in the comments to get this thing down to it's most simple and raw, "CON convincing" form?
The USA was already in debt (about 6 trillion) when bush enacted his dangerous tax scheme. That means that to make up for those cuts, every dollar to cover them and every other government expense had to be borrowed.
A borrowed dollar for the USA comes in the form of a Treasury Bond, which somebody has to buy and earn interest on. The cost for one dollar is actually up to $4.85 in interest.
So with interest, each dollar that bush 'cut' in taxes is now costing us $4.85, thus making his so called 'tax cuts' the largest tax increase in history. If you don't believe me, just go to any compound interest calculator, and you'll see that is what it costs in interest for a 30 year T-Bill with compounded 5% per year interest.
(by the way, the rates change all the time, and as we keep flooding the market with these treasury bonds, the rates have actually gone all the way down to 3.79% as of 9/3/10 which still costs $2.12 per dollar in interest. These are historically low rates though and will likely return to their higher norms.)
The thing is we don't notice that now, a huge portion of our taxes simply go to cover interest on bush's, and reagan's cuts in revenues.
We are paying over $1.5 BILLION a day mostly to the Fed, which owns over $5 trillion worth of this debt, and to countries like China.
So bush's \"tax cuts\" are more like rat poison. They seem to taste good, but they prevent us from actually getting any nutrition. The more we have them, the more we pay in interest instead of towards our normal tax bill, and the less money we have to pay for absolutely anything else.
It is very insidious because nobody really pays much attention to where their tax dollars go.
If somebody had a tax bill of let's say $100, and all of that went to pay for the society we live in, such as infrastructure, research, education, etc. We would be getting our money's worth in a better society.
But with a bush 'tax cut,' we might only have to pay $80 in taxes, but we'd have to owe another $100 in interest just to cover the $20 we were forced to borrow to get that 20% tax cut. What's worse, is that interest we pay goes very disproportionately to very wealthy bond holders who are not only foreign countries, but wealthy people who are buying treasury bonds with the money they were supposed to pay in taxes, thus lending the nation money at a profit that they were supposed to be paying to us. It is the largest redistribution of wealth in the history of the world--to the top, from all the rest of us.
One can easily see, just by looking at the math, that these \"tax cuts\" simply cannot continue, or they will bankrupt us all even more than they already have.
There is another important factor of running these bush deficits--and they are bush deficits because Obama has not been able to change the tax rates at all, which will be the most effective way to alter this equation.
When the government was running surpluses in the late 90's under Clinton's tax structure, there were no new treasury bond auctions. Suddenly there were literally trillions of dollars burning holes in investor's pockets that they needed to put somewhere. They risked a lot of their money in internet start-ups. Some might call it a bubble, but the fact is that flurry of high risk-high reward investment has overall made the entire world far more wealthy. As soon as bush made his first "tax cut," there was a huge sucking sound as investors once again returned to sticking all their money into "safe" treasury bonds.
If we returned to surpluses again, we could see another huge gold rush towards whatever is the new thing, such as green technology or things like nanotechnology, thus propelling society forward rapidly once again. That's why we must end this dangerous tax experiment, and why we must make this very clear to everybody.