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Edited on Fri Aug-19-11 04:08 PM by Bill USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
....I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
to be a little more specific about the decade of 1999-2009, there was a zero net job creation for that decade (a decade in which GOPinc. got just about anything they wanted especially, lower taxes weighted heavily to the wealtiest earners AND DEREGULATION):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html">The Aughts were a Lost Decade for U.S. Economy and Workers - WaPo
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 2, 2010
For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.
The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.
It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
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Income inequality may have been the most significant factor in laying the groundwork for the Great Trickle-Down Deregulation Disaster of 2008. People were using debt more and more (and Greenspan kept money cheap to make credit cheaper and more available for the 'buggers') to maintain a lifestyle to which they were accustomed. Of course, predatory lenders and the demand created for higher payout (subPrime) mortgages by the use of Credit Default Swaps to make higher rate and higher risk CDOs much more marketable, played an essential role in enabling the housing bubble to grow. Of course, predatory lending never would have got traction without Bushco's opposition to any regulatory 'interference' with Predatory lending (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html">Predatory Lenders Partner in Crime - how the Bush administration went to court to stop 50 States attorneys General from reining in P.L.s by enforcing consumer protection laws.).
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