Top Earners Are the Vital, Economic Activists
CARPE DIEM
By Mark J. Perry
>>>It's not Obama's middle-class tax cut that's going to get us out of this economic jam. At best his vision is incomplete. But at worst his aversion to successful earners and investors is a real obstacle to full economic recovery.
Social historian and early supply-side activist Irving Kristol taught us three decades ago that the top earners are the economic activists. They're the ones with the highest propensity to consume and invest. They're the ones who buy the yachts, which are built by blue-collar workers. And they're the ones who run the small businesses and provide the capital for the new entrepreneurial start-ups that are the lifeblood of the economy. It is they who energize free-market capitalism.
If we had an economy without rich people we wouldn't have much of an economy. That's why lower tax rates to reward the economic activists — the most prominent capitalists — are so essential.<<<
~Larry Kudlow
MP: The economic activists who energize the economy also pay most of our income taxes: the top 1% pay about 40% of all income taxes paid, the top 10% pay about 71%, and the top 25% pay more than 86% (2006 data here).
Mortgage Rates Fall to Record Low Level
By Mark J. Perry
30-year fixed rate mortgages closed out the year at 5.14% (data here, see graph above), the lowest rate on record (data back to 1964 here). Falling mortgage rates and falling home prices will be important factors in the real estate market's recovery in 2009.
No Bailout Necessary, Just Reduce Punitive Tariffs to Save and Create More U.S. Jobs
By Mark J. Perry
Tariffs are usually used to protect domestic industries from more efficient foreign competitors. But domestic firms also buy inputs, raw materials, supplies, parts and inventory FROM foreign producers, and in fact more than half of U.S. imports are industrial supplies and parts, and NOT finished consumer goods. In that case, tariffs are a tax on the inputs of domestic businesses and can put them at a significant competitive disadvantage.
Case in point: There is a punitive tariff of up to 17.2% on an imported specific micro-denier suede fabric used extensively by Mississippi furniture manufacturers Lane, Bauhaus, and H.M. Richards. This tariff is about to be removed, saving each of these three firms more than $1 million annually, and saving close to 1,000 jobs in NE Mississippi.
Read about it here, here and here. |
