For 1Perry:
George H. W. Bush wisely pointed out in his 1980 debate with Ronald Reagan that expecting to balance the budget with tax cuts and defense spending increases was “voodoo economics.” But along with Reagan’s ascendancy came the rise of huge budget deficits — that Bush wisely helped end when he agreed to raise taxes in 1990.
Despite $858 billion in December 2010 tax cuts, companies still complain that they pay too much in tax. General Electric (GE) has become famous for paying no taxes on its $5.1 billion in 2010 U.S. profits while keeping a big staff of lawyers on hand to make sure it pays as few of them as possible. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that GE is not alone and that the prevailing estimate for the actual U.S. corporate tax rate is 25% — costing the U.S. about $100 billion in lost revenue.
But corporations have absolutely no reason to complain about taxes. After all, they earned record 2010 profits of $1.68 trillion and 85% of them are beating their first quarter 2011 earnings estimates as 70% are growing revenue faster than expected while their operating margins stand at a near record 19.8%.
Do Tax Cuts Create Jobs? - Forbes
Who needs a tax cut, then? The U.S. economy is very much consumer-driven; companies aren’t hiring, many business owners say, because people aren’t buying. The past behavior of corporations that have received huge tax cuts has not necessarily been to use the money to hire more people; the Bush-era tax cuts have been in place for a decade, and the unemployment rate is still 9.1 percent. And executive compensation has grown. Executives may feel entitled to earn more and more if their companies are doing well and expanding. But without customers, those companies will go bust.
Corporate Tax Cuts Don't Stimulate Job Growth - Susan Milligan (usnews.com)
Th ese fi ndings shouldn’t be surprising: tax cuts always have consequences for public investments, and lower taxes generally lead to lower-quality public services and fewer public sector jobs. Providing businesses with a low-tax, low-service environment is not a winning strategy for att racting investment. Moreover, compared to other costs of doing business, state and local taxes are rather insignifi cant for the companies themselves.
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Whatever short-run benefi t these tax breaks may have for specific businesses, they have a larger corrosive effect on a state’s business climate for two reasons: each of these tax giveaways make it harder for states to adequately fund public services—and these tax giveaways ultimately shift the cost of funding these services onto the backs of every other taxpayer.
http://www.itepnet.org/pdf/pb42.pdf
So with all that cash, why aren't banks lending and big companies investing and creating jobs, one might ask?
The even more important question is: if banks and businesses have that record hoard of cash on hand why should their taxes be cut, in effect increasing even more that hoard of cash that isn't being invested? Won't they just continue to hoard the tax cut too?
The idea that cutting business and wealthy investors' taxes originated in 1961 with then President John F. Kennedy. But at that time business investment tax cuts were tied to proven job creation. Businesses had to prove they added jobs before they could claim the tax cut. That was changed with Reagan. Now businesses could get the tax credits even if they didn't create jobs. Their taxes were cut even if it meant they reduced jobs. By the time of George W. Bush, businesses could claim tax cuts for investments made offshore. GM cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. while adding thousands in China. Ford cut jobs while adding them in St. Petersburg, Russia. Corporations could claim the investment tax cuts, even if jobs were created offshore and simultaneously eliminated in the U.S. In effect, U.S. taxpayers were paying US corporations to send their jobs overseas.
Between 2001-2004 George W. Bush pushed through a series of annual tax cuts for investors and corporations that amounted to a total of $3.4 trillion over the recent decade, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Every tax cut bill passed between 2001-2004 was called a jobs creation bill. More than 80% of the $3.4 trillion eventually accrued to the wealthiest 20% of households and corporations, and most of that to the top 0.1%, or 100,000 households, and the S&P's largest companies. And what did George W. Bush's business-investor tax cut produce in terms of jobs? The period 2001-2004 witnessed the weakest jobs creation on record following a recession. It took a full 46 months just to recover the level of jobs in the U.S. that existed in January 2001, when the recession began. Estimates today after the current recession are that it will take 7-8 years to recover the lost jobs, if even then.
Why Tax Cuts Don’t—and Won’t—Create Jobs - Working In These Times
That was just the next few. There's even more if you want to read.
