Tax Cuts Get the Job Done

If it weren't for the sub-prime mortgage debacle resulting from the Democrats "everyone should own a home" philosophy whether or not they are financially able to pay, the Bush economic surge would still be in operation. The numbers don't lie and Obama should take heed.

Excerpt: When Obama talks of "paying for the tax cuts," he means raising taxes, something many Democrats opposed in the midst of a fierce recession. But it never occurs to him that if he's looking to raise tax revenue, fueling faster economic growth is the way to do it. And if he's looking for a role model that shows how this works, he need only examine the much higher federal-revenue numbers in the last five years of Bush's presidency. A look at the record shows that soon after Bush accelerated his tax cuts in 2003, the economy entered a five-year period when the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent and federal tax revenues rose by hundreds of billions of dollars -- sharply cutting the budget deficit.

Here's the story: When Bush was running for office in 2000, the economy was in the midst of a high-tech, dot-com economic boom (largely because of the Republicans' capital-gains tax cuts that President Clinton signed into law). Then the bubble burst in 2001, and the economy fell into a recession. Bush pushed through an across-the-board reduction in income tax rates that would be phased in over several years.

But as the recession worsened, unemployment -- then at a low 4.7 percent -- rose to 5.8 percent in 2002 and 6 percent in 2003. Federal tax receipts, which had hit a high of $2 trillion in 2000, fell to $1.9 trillion in 2001, $1.8 trillion in 2002 and $1.7 trillion in 2003.

Clearly, the recessionary economy needed a much faster-acting booster shot, and that's when Bush and Congress stepped up the tax cuts in 2003. The economy responded.

Contrary to Obama's leftist, anti-cut ideology, the government's tax revenues did not fall as a result of Bush's income-tax cuts, which affected every tax bracket, including a new, lower rate for lower-income people. Revenues rose to $1.88 trillion in 2004, $2.15 trillion in 2005, $2.4 trillion in 2006 and to $2.6 trillion in 2007 (a record that stands today).

In other words, tax revenues rose by more than $800 billion in just four years, caused by the reduction of tax rates and the surging economic growth that pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average index to a record 14,164 points on Oct. 9, 2007.

At the same time, the national unemployment rate plunged as the economy expanded: dropping to 5.5 percent in 2004; 5.1 percent in 2005; and down to 4.6 percent in 2006 and 2007. As the government's revenues increased, Bush's budget deficit fell sharply, dropping to a tame $161 billion in 2007 -- a record that trillion-dollar Obama can only dream about.

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