Great headline in Sunday's NY Times:
"A Gift the Wealthy Don’t Need"and people, you just know the "gift" in question is a chunk of their own money.
Then today PK takes up
the same cudgel:
"But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle."
Let's break this BS down piece by piece, ok?
"When we save a schoolteacher's job that unambiguously aids employment".
It may well aid employment, but it's hard to be certain without knowing what the alternative use of the money might have been. It's also not the case that "we saved a job" means the policy was a correct policy. "At what cost" still remains relevant.
"when we give millionaires more money instead".
This is the real stunner. First, families earning $250,000 or more is not exactly the same thing as "millionaires".
Second, we "give" them?
Really?
I am pretty sure it's their money to begin with and "we" are talking about how much to take. There's no gift giving involved.
Here's another PK gem:
"In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter."
People, the "gift to millionaires" we are debating is just not that much money compared to the kind of budget hole we face. PK elsewhere says the lost revenue would be "$700 billion over a decade", i.e. $70 billion a year.
That's not going to re pave America folks. It's kind of small potatoes (is that right or did I just go all Dan Quayle on the English language). We are going to need a lot more than that from the millionaires to achieve PK's vision.
Finally, I don't see how anyone can say with a straight face that the problem with our educational system is too little money is being spent!
Yikes!
