Please note the answers above that repeat the demonstrably false corporatist line: taxes do not increase revenue, but tax cuts--along with cuts in spending (code for spending on education, job creation, housing, food, medical care--the total not approaching what we lose on taxes not collected) balance our budget and create new jobs and greater prosperity for all Americans. The problem lies in the myth that people who are not successful financially, presumably because they are lazy and eager to live off the public dole, are leeching from the wealthy the capital the wealthy need. These hard-working people, thanks to their hard work and success, are those who generate prosperity for everyone--the rising tide lifting all boats. Policy must ensure that as much money as possible is transferred to their hands so that they can invest it in economic growth.
This myth preys on the fiction that private businesses promote growth, jobs, efficiency, and progress, and that government stands in the way of these benefits. Yet a quick study of the TVA as part of the building of what was then the best infrastructure in the world--including phone service--and of NASA (which led to the US lead at the time as the premier innovator and manufacturer in electronic technology) puts the lie to this fiction.
Today's big businesses seek to reduce jobs in the US--even at the cost of our losing our manufacturing base--and to merge into ever larger monopolistic behemoths capable of deciding political campaigns, writing our laws, etc., owning and controlling our media, and (above all) keeping the status quo over which they exercise control. The middle class is suffering so that the top one or two percent of Americans can acquire wealth and power far beyond anything most of us can imagine, at everyone else's expense.
(Take a cold, sober look at today's government. Is it not the fact that multi-national corporations control it?)
So, given these facts, why are so many replies above directed at doing harm to people who have the least power and who lack the ability to lobby for themselves as the top one or two percent of our population do?
I return to the fact that our media are owned and run by the rich and powerful:
"Corporations have multimillion-dollar budgets to dissect and attack news reports they dislike. But with each passing year they have yet another power: They are not only hostile to independent journalists. They are their employers."
— Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p. 65
Robert McChesney, in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, traces from the inception of radio the history of the takeover of our media by the privileged classes. Not just the commercial media but even the public media are forced to be self-censoring. If they publish stories that place in the light of day the corrupt practices and policies of a government forced to kneel before those who fund the campaigns of our "elected" officials, they risk losing both advertising revenue and their very jobs.
At one time the media were viewed as the watchdog of democracy; now they are the propaganda tool of corporatist America. Today's commercial media must accomplish two objectives: (1) make increasingly more money, usually by dumbing down content, and (2) tell us what their owners what us to hear.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that, although Fox News won the case that allows the media to "lie and distort" the news the media report, other major commercial organizations filed amici briefs along with Fox. Journalist ethics have no meaning when one's employer has but contempt for such ethics.
***Edit: You are absolutely correct that lowering taxes, especially on the wealthiest people least likely to spend it, always increases the deficit. As Robert Ricketts of Rawls College of Business at Tech Tech University explains:
"While this view has gained political currency, there is little evidence to support it. Indeed, as evident in the following graph, the evidence suggests that tax cuts do not increase revenues to the government in any meaningful way, but instead increase government deficits. Likewise, tax increases are often criticized as harmful to the economy and opponents argue that they do not actually increase government revenues. Again, the available evidence suggests that the opposite is true.
Regardless of the effect of changes in tax rates on the economy, it is important to recognize that the idea that tax cuts increase government revenues while tax increases decrease them is a myth. It is equally important to recognize that in the long run, taxes are equal to government spending. Every dollar the government spends is a tax dollar -- it has no other source of revenue. The question is when that dollar will be paid, and who will pay it." (
(http://rricketts.ba.ttu.edu/Tax Rates and Revenues.htm)
Why is it that corporatists and those who have been taken in by corporatist propaganda fail to mention that the golden age of expansion in America--innovation, manufacturing, income growth of the middle and lower middle classes, etc., occurred in the 50s, when the highest income tax bracket was 91?nd in the 60s, when it was 70?