It benefits the country by helping to pay down the national debt.
that, at least, is true. or, it
would be true, if it
did help pay down debt. the likelihood is that it
won't, so this would be one of those good-initiative-bad-judgement routines.
It benefits me by allowing me to "keep more of what I earn". Otherwise, taxes would need to be raised on ALL of us, a concept I have no problem with personally, but when I earn less than X annually and someone else who earns X4 my gross income but has been receiving tax breaks for 2-3 decades, I'd say they've had more than their fair share of "investment income incentives" to move the economy along.
you've recieved a tax break right along with them; the rates were lowered for everybody.
The Bush tax cuts didn't work because the rich didn't reinvest in this country's future.
this is objectively not true. not only did revenues increase after the tax cuts, but the share of revenues paid by the wealthy increased. not only did the shares of revenue paid by the wealthy increase, they increased ahead of their pre-cut projections. according to none other than Christina Romer (President Obama's former lead economist), the tax cuts on the wealthy had a 'large and consistent positive output effect' (IE: it grew the economy, and continued to grow the economy).
Instead, it would appear that they followed the Wall Street montra of "greed is good". If you doubt it, how do you explain the recession? You'll of course say it was homeowners who bought homes they couldn't afford, but let's not forget in most cases it was banks and mortgage lenders who convinced these people they could purchase their homes at low APR and refinance later (2-3 yrs).
gosh, gee wiz, now why would a bank deliberately lend money that it knew it had a low chance of getting back.
i'm sure it had nothing at all to do with the fact that that was precisely what they were being ordered to do by the government.
the current recession is the result of an almost Perfect Storm of factors which came to be mutually-reinforcing. the politcal push to have lending institutions put more low-income people into housing (incidentally, no one ever mentions the greed of someone seeking a house above their means) combined with increased local property restrictions and a loose-money policy to send housing prices into a bubble. the desperate desire of the banks to be rid of the risk that the government had pushed them into combined with an implicit government backing of freddie and fannie to create a market for selling mortgage-backed securities. all it took was one pause (the jump in gas prices helped), and the whole ponzi scheme was revealed. once housing prices stopped skyrocketing upwards, flippers and those who had bought
way above themselves walked away from the houses that now had more debt on them than they were worth. this sank not only the value of those securities, but everyone else's property value; which banks hold as worth to cover their investments. a simple alteration to the mark-to-marketing rule would have saved banks the
vast majority of their losses in this case, but there you are.
then government tried to 'fix' it; which so far has worked about as well as it did under Hoover and FDR. massive debt-driven 'stimulus' plans served to soak up all investment capital. instead of looking for ways to invest in the American economy, foriegn and local holders of dollars invested in government debt; which means that instead of being spent on businesses and
recovery; those dollars were spent on bridges to nowhere and studies on robot bees.
IE: we had a financial bubble, caused by government distortion of market signals (both from Congress and the Fed; as well as local governments). and then, when it popped, government took all the capital that
would have
normally led to recovery and spent it all on Congresscritters favorite pork projects. And so here we are today.
How'd that work out for low-income families who's only real mistake was trying to live the American dream?
that wasn't their mistake; i have a low-income family, and we are living the American dream. we will be buying a house
the right way; not the greedy instant-gratification-gotta-have-it-now way. as for low-income families who lost out, they are suffering; which is typical of what happens to them when government tries to 'help' them by giving them something. minorities, for example: local organizations were given veto power on bank expansions in order to provide a means of forcing that bank to loan certain percentages and amounts to minorities. buuuut, minorities often couldn't afford as much. soooo, the banks created fancy new ways (ARMs, etc) for them to be
able to afford to
get a mortgage so that the government wouldn't punish them; and then sold those mortgages off as fast as they could. those targeted minorities, meanwhile, were left holding half the potato when the music stopped playing, and suffered accordingly.
It's a call for them to give back to the country who helped make them millionaires in the first place in providing the very investment opportunities and tax shelters they've come to enjoy so much.
they already do that, by paying more taxes than any other comparable demographic in this nation and providing much of the economic expansion and dynamism that drive our economy.
however, for an idea of what the impact of your proposed tax hike will be, go back through the argument for 'raising taxes on the rich', and everywhere you see the word "rich", remove it and replace it with the word "employers".