I've heard this argument on NPR, and I heard it again on Livejournal tonight. "Kerry wasn't going to raise taxes, he was going to put them back where they were before Bush raised them."
How could anyone think that's possibly an argument? What if I said I didn't want to eliminate taxes, I just wanted to set the income tax back at the rate it was in 1912? (Which was 0%, for the curious.)
It's the same kind of nonsense you hear when someone screams that someone wants to "cut public education" or "cut funding for the arts". Almost every time that statement is uttered, someone has proposed reducing a 10% increase to a 5% one. A smaller increase is not a cut.
Allow me to quote someone for you:
"Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."
That was said by the liberal hero John F Kennedy, as he rolled back the massive tax increases that were enacted by Hoover and Roosevelt, in some brackets by over 20%.
Even he realized that overtaxation stifles an economy, and in many cases you can actually increase government revenue by lowering taxes. It's kind of like taking a speed limiter off your car, higher taxes stifle an economy, and chase people to greener pastures.
