According to Noam Chomsky in his recent book Who Rules the World?, For the public, the primary domestic concern is the severe crisis of unemployment. Under prevailing circumstances, that critical problem could have been overcome only by a significant government stimulus, well beyond the one Obama initiated in 2009, which barely matched declines in state and local spending, though it still did probably save millions of jobs. For financial institutions, the primary concern is the deficit. Therefore, only the deficit is under discussion. A large majority of the population (72 percent) favor addressing the deficit by taxing the very rich. Cutting health programs is opposed by overwhelming majorities (69 percent in the case of Medicaid, 78 percent for Medicare). The likely outcome is therefore the opposite. Obviously, none of the above is in line with what is likely to happen in the near future. As the link above to my recent article on Dean Baker's ideas shows, much of the deficit is fixable with changes to policies that govern the "free markets".
However, none of that matters as Republicans are very likely to try gutting education, pollution regulations, and medicare, while giving huge tax breaks to the rich. These would all seem to be the exact opposite way in which the majority of Americans would wish to see this done.
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Figure 2 shows that there is no correlation between cuts in top tax rates and average annual real GDP-per-capita growth since the 1970s. For example, countries that made large cuts in top tax rates such as the United Kingdom or the United States have not grown significantly faster than countries that did not, such as Germany or Denmark. Hence, a substantial fraction of the response of pre-tax top incomes to top tax rates documented in Figure 1 may be due to increased rent-seeking at the top rather than increased productive effort. |