Dear Editor,
This is a response to the Feb. 11 letter critical of John McCain for opposing tax cuts.?
The wealth in the U.S. has shifted dramatically from the middle to upper class. Now the wealthiest 1 percent have one-third of the wealth and cutting taxes for them produced insupportable debt.
Republicans will cut government spending, you may say, but that is not what the record shows. Clinton balanced the budget in his last years in office. Bush, working with a Republican congress, ran a huge deficit. The last president to actually cut government spending was Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, in 1965. Taxes don’t hurt the economy. Europe has much higher taxes than us, and their economy is booming. Spending doesn’t hurt the economy either; most government spending goes directly or indirectly into jobs. What hurts the economy is debt.
You may ask, why not adopt the flat tax, or replace the income tax with a sales tax? That would continue to give tax relief to the super rich, by shifting the tax burden to the working class. The trouble is that now so much of the money is in the hands of the rich, that the poor simply don’t have enough money to pay for the federal government. Many of the rich are more than willing to do their share. The two richest men in the United States, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, are Democrats, and oppose tax cuts for the rich.
Why so many working people favor tax cuts for the rich has always been hard for me to understand. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, wrote in “Wealth of Nations” that the burden of taxes must of necessity fall on those best able to pay.
– Rick Norwood

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