Fox & Friends advanced several dubious claims to suggest that ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would hurt "many small businesses" and hinder job growth. In fact, the Tax Policy Center has stated that only 2.5 percent of taxpayers who report business income on their individual tax returns would pay higher rates, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has stated that extending tax cuts "does not create much incentive ... to hire more workers."
Perino pushes claim that allowing Bush tax cut to expire would be "a terrible idea for job growth"
Perino: "Raising taxes on anybody in a recession is a terrible idea for job growth." On the November 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said that the White House needs to "cave" to Republicans on a plan to extend the Bush tax cuts for all income levels and claimed that "
aising taxes on anybody in a recession is a terrible idea for job growth."
CBO: Extending tax cuts for wealthy "does not create much incentive ... to hire more workers"; is poor stimulus
CBO: Extending tax cuts "does not create much incentive ... to hire more workers." CBO director Douglas Elmendorf stated in February written testimony that "eferring the scheduled increases in tax rates in 2011 would help some businesses" but that "increasing the after-tax income of businesses typically does not create much incentive for them to hire more workers in order to produce more, because production depends principally on their ability to sell their products."
Economists: Extending the tax cuts that benefit only the wealthy is poor stimulus. Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center (TPC) wrote that "higher income households are more likely to bank the cash than spend it. As a result, tax cuts for these high-earners will do relatively little to boost the economy in the short run." CBO has also stated that as stimulus, allowing only the top tax cuts to expire "would be more cost-effective" than extending all of the cuts "because the higher-income households that would be excluded would probably save a larger fraction of their increase in after-tax income." Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also said of extending the tax cuts for the wealthy: "t's hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy."
http://mediamatters.org/research/201011150018