|
Bush 2001
Tax Cuts Have Failed
Job
Quality & Security Have Declined
Only
Very Richest Benefit from Tax Cuts
http://faireconomy.org/press/2006/No_Thanks_Report_01.06.pdf
No Correlation Between Bush
Tax Cuts and
Job Creation, Report Shows
"By
cutting taxes on income, we helped create jobs," President
Bush said in an address Friday to business executives at the
Economic Club in Chicago.
BOSTON—As President Bush and his senior
advisors traveled across the country this past weekend touting
2005 job growth numbers and demanding that Congress make the
administration's tax cuts permanent, a study examines the
administration's claim that tax cuts create jobs—and finds it
without merit.
While two million jobs were created in 2005,
this is 3.5 million jobs short of expectations by the
President's Council of Economic Advisors, who estimate job
growth at 3.1% in a normal year. Jobs grew by only 1.5% in 2005.
"The president's tax-cutting policy is a
failure in regard to job creation, and we need to recognize it
as such, " said Anisha Desai, program director at UFE and
one of the report's co-authors. "While there is no evidence
that massive tax cuts create jobs, there is considerable
evidence that they contribute to economy-choking deficits." The report reviewed administration claims
that "tax cuts create jobs" and found the following:
Tax cuts have no predictable effect on
employment, either in job creation or job destruction.
Since 2003, job creation has fallen millions
of jobs short of the administration's promises. The current weakness in job creation during
an economic recovery is unprecedented since World War II.
The report highlighted other concerns about
jobs and the economy as well. For example, the number of good
quality jobs (defined as those paying at least $16 an hour,
providing employer-paid health insurance, and providing a
pension) has remained flat at 25% of all workers.
Significant racial disparities exist: black
employment is at 89.6%, compared to 95.2% for whites. And Latino
workers average more than $10,000 per year less in earnings than
whites, and this gap is increasing.
The report, entitled "Nothing to Be
Thankful For: Tax Cuts and the Deteriorating U.S. Job
Market" was co-authored by Anisha Desai, Scott Klinger,
Gloribell Mota, and Liz Stanton.
A new report by the Center for Economic
and Policy Research (CEPR) define “good jobs” as those
paying at least $16 an hour, providing employer-paid health
insurance, and providing a pension.
Source:
United for a Fair Economy
is a national non-profit that spotlights the growing economic
divide in the U.S.
* * *
* *
Nothing
to be Thankful For
Tax
Cuts and the Deteriorating U.S. Job Market
(excerpts from report)
Executive Summary
The Bush administration’s promise that tax
cuts for the rich would trickle down to workers has been broken.
And when tax cuts and more tax cuts haven’t succeeded in job
creation or economic stimulus, how can we expect that still more
tax cuts or permanent tax cuts somehow will? As another year of
jobless recovery draws to a close, this report exposes the false
claim that tax cuts have the power to create much-needed new
jobs in our economy, and asks the question: “Have tax cuts
given most of us anything to be thankful for?”
The Bush tax cuts did not produce new jobs.
In 2003, the President’s Council on Economic Advisers promised
1.4 million new jobs by the end of 2004, over and above the 4.1
million jobs expected from normal economic growth. Although the
actual jobs created failed to even match those expected in a
normally functioning economy, let alone one supposedly
supercharged by tax cuts, that hasn’t stopped conservative
forecasters from returning to the “tax cuts create jobs”
mantra in 2005 (a year in which only 2 million new jobs were
created).
Changes in tax policy have no clear impact
on job growth. Tax cuts have sometimes been followed by
periods of increased unemployment; at other times, tax cuts have
been followed by sharp declines in unemployment. By the same
token, tax increases have not always been followed by the
doomsday predicted by conservatives. One of the most robust
periods of job growth and economic expansion followed the
Clinton tax increases of 1993.
The quality of jobs declined appreciably
since the 2001 tax cuts as measured by income, health
insurance and retirement benefits has. Between 2000 and 2004,
inflation-adjusted family income has declined, and the number of
U.S. workers covered by employer-provided retirement benefits
and health insurance has contracted. The less than normal number
of jobs created have been less than what is needed to provide a
reasonable standard of living.
African-American and Latino families have
seen their economic security deteriorate at an even greater
rate than white families. Despite the President’s statement
that tax cuts would create jobs for all who want them, we have
instead seen a widening of the racial economic divide.
African-American unemployment remains about twice as high as
that of white workers. In addition, the earnings gap between
white workers and workers of color has grown even wider since
the 2001 tax cuts.
Tax cuts for today’s taxpayers are a tax
burden for tomorrow’s taxpayers. While politicians say
that tax-cut plans won’t increase the de. cit, there’s
little evidence that this is anything but an “urban legend”
popular in Washington, D.C.
Even without any sort of special economic
stimulus, it’s “normal” for the economy to create new jobs
over and above the number of jobs that are lost in a year. Our
labor force grows bigger every year and an equal number of new
jobs must be created in the economy just to maintain the same
percentage of people employed.
Race, Jobs, and Tax Cuts
Tax cuts haven’t been good for the average
worker and have had a particularly bad effect on workers of
color. Families in groups historically under-rewarded for their
labor remain under-rewarded, and in some cases have fallen even
further behind during the current round of tax cuts. The
quantity and quality of jobs available to people of color has
lagged behind that of white workers, and tax
cuts have done little to narrow the gulf between relatively high
white employment and much lower employment for blacks and
Latinos.
There is also considerable evidence that
whites disproportionately hold the “good” jobs, as defined
by the CEPR reveals an enormous gap between white earnings and
the earnings of blacks and Latinos, with the gap for black
earnings staying fairly steady in recent years and the larger
gap for Latino earnings growing quickly.
There is also a racial disparity in who has
health insurance. In 2004, 11.3 percent of whites had no health
insurance, compared to 19.7 percent of blacks and 32.7 percent
of Latinos. Similarly, in 2003, 51.1 percent of whites received
employer-based pension benefits, compared to 40.9 percent of
blacks and 25.8 percent of Latinos.
Conclusions
“Tax cuts create jobs” is a great sound
bite that unfortunately does not hold true in the real world
economy. Tax cuts disproportionately giving public dollars back
to the rich foster economic disparity. And overly exuberant tax
cutting often creates government deficits sizeable enough to
create an undue burden on the next generations. Except for those
on the very highest rungs of the economic ladder, if anything is
trickling out of today’s tax cut policies, it’s increased
economic insecurity.
Since 2001 when the tax cutting party began,
declining family incomes, reduced access to health care and
anxiety about retirement security have occurred on a widespread
scale — not the shared prosperity, high employment and better
life that were promised in the invitation to the feast. Only the
richest receive these benefits, along with the increasingly low
tax rates that are the hallmark of the plan. We see the broken
promises of White House forecasts to deliver millions of added
jobs. Worse still, we see a widening of the gap between rich
taxpayers and everyone else, and an exacerbation of the wealth
divide among the races, with unemployment among blacks and
Latinos diverging from white unemployment by ever-widening
margins.
The perceived public appetite for tax cuts is
not born of a desire to deprive government of funding adequate
to carry out its mission, as many administration officials would
maintain, but rather a desire by insecure citizens to
have a more economically secure life. In poll after poll, when
voters are surveyed about their desire for tax cuts as opposed
to improving valued government services like education and
health care, significant majorities choose the government
services they most value.
The tax cutting policy is bankrupt — it has
no effect on GDP, and its windfalls are just as likely to fund
the purchase of jewels or artwork for private collections as to
finance new factories that create new jobs. It’s time to
recognize that jobs are both created and destroyed during times
of tax decreases. The same is true during periods of tax
increases. If what we value as a nation is opportunity and
economic security for all, if we believe that everyone should
have a job and that work should pay, if we believe our nation
has enough so that every hungry child can be fed, then it is
these measures that should be evaluated in light of calls to
reduce tax cuts.
What have tax cuts given us to be thankful
for? Nothing. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were a feast for the
rich taken directly from the tables of the poor, the working
class, the middle class, people of color, children and the
elderly. Tax cuts were made in the name of jobs that have not
materialized.
Instead, they reveal a government acting in
service of the voracious appetite of a tiny minority, the very
richest few, in the United States.
* *
* * *
Are You Better Off Than You
Were
Before the 2001 Tax Cuts?
• Median household income in the United
States in 2004: $44,389
• Change in median household income (all
races) since 2000: Declined 3.6%
• Change in median household income for
blacks since 2000: Declined 7.4%
• Change in median household income for
Latinos since 2000: Declined 5.9%
• Percent of U.S. population living in
poverty in 2004: 12.7%, up from 11.3% in 2000
• Additional number of individuals living
in poverty since 2000: 5,416,000
• Additional number of children living in
poverty since 2000: 1,440,000
• Additional number of elderly living in
poverty since 2000: 134,000
• Increase in blacks living in poverty
since 2000: Up 2.2 percentage points to 24.7%
• Increase in children living in poverty
since 2000: Up 1.6 percentage points to 17.8%
• Increase in black children living in
poverty since 2000: Up 2.4 percentage points to 33.6%
HEALTH INSURANCE
• Percent of U.S. population receiving
employment-based health insurance in 2004: 59.8%
• Percent of people receiving
employment-based health insurance in 2000: 63.6%
• Additional number of people living
without health insurance since 2000: 6,016,000
• Percent of Latinos receiving
employment-based health insurance in 2004: 41.1%
• Percent of Latinos receiving
employment-based health insurance in 2000: 44.0%
• Percent of population receiving
employer-based pension benefits in 2003: 45.9%
• Percent of population receiving
employer-based pension benefits in 2000: 48.3%
WORKING HOURS
• Average annual work hours by U.S. workers
in 2002: 1,815 hours
• Average annual work hours in other
industrialized (OECD) countries in 2002: 1,602 hours
• How much more do U.S. workers work in
2002: 213 hours, or 5 weeks of work
Sources: Income, poverty and health
insurance data from Appendices A, B, and C in Income, Poverty
and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2004, US
Census Bureau, August 2005; pension and working hours data from
Table 7.18 in Mishel et al., Economic Policy Institute, The
State of Working America, 2005.
Source:
United for a Fair Economy
/
Pressroom Reports
United for a Fair Economy is a national non-profit that spotlights the growing economic
divide in the U.S
posted 19 January 2006
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
|
* * * * *
 |
Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
|
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 27 December 2011
|
