The United States in 1913 was far different than the it is today. “Unions” were limited to craft guilds (and I believe that “collective bargaining” as we know it today was illegal). There was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid. The freeing of the slaves in the south gave way to rampant Jim Crowism along with racial subordination. Women could not vote. When you went to the hospital, it meant you were going to die. There was no infrastructure yet—such as the interstate highway system—as cars were just coming of age. And it would be another year before a major world war would start, necessitating a stronger defense, and the U.S.'s coming new world role as a formidable foreign power. Military investments by our government later enabled the space age and the advent of NASA.
So yes, Michele Bachmann saying that income taxes were 7% in 1913 and were 70% by 1980 (in this PolitiFact ruling) was True, but it was a far different country we lived in as far as what services our tax revenues provided. And, taxes didn’t rise on a straight line, either, as writer Lou Jacboson briefly recognized in two short paragraphs, “…For every year between1944 to 1963, the top tax rate exceeded 90 percent.” That’s a period of 19 years, until it was lowered to the rate Bachmann specifies.
The other implication of her statement seems to be that taxes rose steadily until about the time Reagan became president, to give Ronald Reagan credit where credit wasn’t really due, as the one who started the movement to cut taxes (since shortly after his initial cuts, he went on to raise them several times). One Facebook commenter, Dean Hare, put it this way:
I would have ranked this as Mostly True due to the cherry-picked dates, because the rates during the Eisenhower administration were 91%, and all the current Republicans want to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan by making 'Historic" tax cuts. You were a little generous and need to re-visit this. I think you need to keep in mind with ALL your tax policy rulings the facts that the World War II debt was paid off with these high tax rates and an economy booming with publicly funded physical and intellectual infrastructure spending (ie: Government Stimulus on roads, the military and education). Too many of your rulings forget the tax policy and federal spending history from the 1945-1980 era -- and you also refuse to cite the eleven tax increases Reagan signed into law after it became obvious his initial cuts were too deep, requiring additional revenues.
Another Facebook commenter (or topic page) with the name "Economics Online Tutor" published a comparison of U.S. economic performane and tax policies since 1913 on their Facebook wall, and it's worth a view in the context of Bachmann's other implication in this statement, that tax cuts stimulate the economy.
If a Democrat had said this I could just hear my conservative counterpart screaming that writer Lou Jacobson was ignoring the underlying argument (but neither blog post nor Facebook comment could be found on that from him, being as Bachmann is a Republican). Without underlying context Bachmann’s statement means very little, and there’s more than a few caveats here. This is not the usual Bachmann whopper, but PolitiFact certainly appears to be throwing her a bone in the way it was ruled on.
No comments:
Post a Comment