Capitalism

[Bomp]

1. Higher taxes don't neccessarily mean higher unemployment. Clinton raised taxes and created 22 million jobs in eight years. Bush cut them and created five, although that will probably be closer to four by the time he leaves office.

You'll find right wing nutjob organisations like the Heritage Foundation or AEI (funded by billionaires to argue for tax cuts for billionaires) which will publish studies showing that tax increases will kill jobs, but in reality that would only be the case if you raised the rate from 36% to 86%. The rate was actually 90% during the 1950s and 60s and US GDP was growing about 10% a year then, now it's 3 ish (when the economy isn't melting down anyway.)

So inreality tax increases aren't going to stop job creation or cause a drop in economic growth. In fact the actual evidence over the last two decades shows clearly that the tax rate is too low and that moderate tax increases are actually greatly beneficial to the economy.

2. The free market was left to sort out the last big market crash in 1929 and there was no intervention for a year, which caused the whole thing to snowball into a Depression. There is not one reputable economist who would claim that if governments hadn't intervened in the last couple of months that we'd have avoided another Depression. The Reagan-era free market philosphy is now over, governments are going to insist on much more effective regulation of financial markets otherwise another meltdown will just happen again in a decade or so.

This is the argument which seems to be overlooked by the media. It isn't a linear relationship between taxation and employment (or other economic stuff), THAT would suggest that 0% tax is best for the economy, and not even the GOP believes that. Obama wants to raise the taxes of the richest 5% to what they were in the 90s, when the US goverment weren't running a deficit every year and goverment spending was lower, somehow the GOP gets Marxism out of this and the idiot media are running with it.