The NYT's quote in the subject line just about sums up the whole "debate" over Bush's tax cuts. They have an excellent editorial out on it:
Republicans and the Middle Classhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/opinion/14tue1.html?hpexcerpt:
....Ultimately, the case for the top-level tax cuts is increasingly shaky.
If Republicans are the least bit serious about reducing the deficit, they have to acknowledge that doing so requires additional revenues, $700 billion of which would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners in the next decade if their taxes do not rise. Handing out those revenues to the rich would have little stimulative effect on the economy because those taxpayers tend to save rather than spend their marginal income.
Mr. Cantor and other hard-line tax-cutters like to claim that the high-end cuts would go to small businesses and other “job creators.” But they should listen carefully to another of Mr. Boehner’s surprising acknowledgments on Sunday. Under sharp questioning from Bob Schieffer on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Boehner admitted that only 3 percent of small businesses would pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s proposal. As the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation recently reported, 97 percent of the taxpayers with business income would get a cut under Mr. Obama’s plan.
That is something that Republicans simply do not say out loud; it would add inconvenient facts to a battle that they prefer to wage at a purely emotional level. But Mr. Obama’s efforts to enact a reasonable tax policy are not just good politics. They make good sense.
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