The Bush tax-rate reductions aren't about putting money into anyone's pockets, certainly not the pockets of the rich. The tax-rate reductions and the tax reforms the president has gotten enacted into law are all about creating incentives to work, save, invest and take entrepreneurial risks.
It's impossible to help the poor by punishing the rich because the poor need access to capital, which the rich own, and the productivity-enhancing machinery and software it produces. Injure capital and you incapacitate labor. Stifle capital formation and you smother job creation.
Taxing capital, raising tax rates on individuals earning more than $200,000 and punishing American firms doing business abroad, all of which Kerry proposes, won't take money out of the pockets of rich people; it will destroy the jobs of working people. It will cripple entrepreneurial risk-taking and prevent tomorrow's jobs from ever being created, and it will do serious harm to most small businesses (which create two-thirds of the new private-sector jobs in this country), 70 percent of whose owners might appear "rich" on paper because they file tax returns as individuals, not corporations.
The proof is in the pudding, and the economic pudding has clearly gelled. The government recently revised second-quarter GDP growth up to 3.3 percent from an earlier reported 2.8 percent. Third-quarter economic growth may actually have hit 5 percent and shows no indication of slowing down. Since the second quarter of 2003, inflation-adjusted economic growth has averaged 4.7 percent, 42 percent higher than the 40-year average growth rate of 3.3 percent. And growth is translating into more personal prosperity. Year over year, personal income growth is up 5 percent, and wage and salary income is up 4.6 percent.
As for jobs, don't believe the gloom and doom coming out of the Kerry campaign.
Unemployment, at 5.4 percent, is lower than the 5.8 percent rate it averaged during the 1990s, and new jobs and new business ventures are being created at a rapid rate.
The rich aren't the enemy of the working man; it's the stupid tax, regulatory and trade policies emanating from Washington that threaten working and middle-class Americans. That's the case the president has to make in the next debate, and it's a strong case because the facts and economic theory both are on his side.