Isn't the Obama Compromise designed to "prove"...

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

...tax cuts create jobs?

Just seems like that's going to be the message from the MSM echo chamber. Doesn't matter that there were other considerations, dumb-America can't handle more than a four word phase like "Tax Cuts Create Jobs" before the oxygen flow to the brain stops.

[rfranklin]

1. This is an absolute fantasy that conservatives hold as gospel...

Will Higher Taxes on the Rich Kill Jobs?

....In fact, during the 1950s and early 1960s, when America experienced its most impressive stretch of sustained growth, marginal tax rates on the rich were the highest they've ever been -- 91 percent for the top bracket. Meanwhile, during the last decade, when top tax rates were at one of their lowest points in recent history, the US economy experienced its slowest annual growth rate since the Great Depression. Domestic economic growth from 2001 to 2007 averaged 2.39 percent per year (and growth from 2001 through the third quarter of 2010 averaged 1.66 percent). Even during the period between 1971 and 1980 -- the decade with the second-worst showing for growth -- annual growth averaged 3.21 percent.

"The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you," Warren Buffett, the world's third wealthiest person, recently told ABC News' Christiane Amanpour: "But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on." Buffet joined more than 40 of the nation's millionaires -- part of a group called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength -- to ask President Obama to discontinue Bush's tax breaks for the rich.

Reagan's Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was the single largest peacetime tax hike in the nation's history. The act was meant to alleviate a deficit swollen by dramatic increases in defense spending and the massive tax cuts of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which dramatically slashed taxes across the board. TEFRA was so unpopular with hardcore conservatives that Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) ran an insurgent campaign against it, sparking speculation that he would challenge Reagan from the right in the GOP primaries in 1984. "There's no way we can get out of this recession by raising taxes," Kemp (R-NY) warned at the time, echoing the mantras of the Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal, and ultra-conservatives like Congressman Newt Gingrich. But contrary to the claims of Kemp's faction, the economy started to expand only after the passage of the TEFRA tax hikes, which negated around one-third of Reagan's 1981 cuts. Growth surged by almost nine points between the end of 1982 (when TEFRA kicked in) and the second quarter of 1983.

....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/will-higher-taxes-on-the-_b_790417.html

[Hannah Bell]

3. i believe the "biggest tax hike in history" was the reagan-greenspan 50%

increase on fica in 1983. a tax on workers.

[soryang]

2. Even David Stockman says the tax cuts won't create jobs

Increased marginal tax rates create jobs by forcing wealth to seek to avoid the tax increases with tangible capital expenditures to obtain business tax credits and business tax deductions, such as depreciation. You need the carrot as well as the stick. Increased investments in capital result in increased commerce and increased payroll which is alse tax deductible.

This is basic business tax law. If you don't increase marginal rates the money won't be spent, it will be hoarded and speculated. The principle of higher marginal tax rates is use it or lose it. This prevents the alienation of wealth from commerce and creates a multiplier effect of capital distribution for improved productivity by modernizing plant and infrastructure.

[gratuitous]

4. Well, if another two years of tax cuts don't create jobs

I think the Republicans will be willing to give it just another decade or so on top of the 12 years already spent.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

5. Yes, but have you heard the latest RW talking point?

JFK is the new Ronald Reagan.

"JFK cut taxes and the economy grew."

Doesn't matter that there are other factors at work, among other things, JFK closed loopholes that actually increased the amount the rich paid in taxes, only "tax cuts create jobs" resonates with these people.

I wonder how that figures into Obama's chess match...???

Republican meme: "Obama accepted our tax cuts plan and the economy grew!"

As with anything, that puts the onus on (Dems) the Obama adm to explain why everything together worked.

FAIL

[hfojvt]

6. I said as much a few days ago

and their timing is gonna be just right too. The economy has created over a million jobs in the last year, as it continues on the path of improvement that is bound to get better and better and good old Reaganomics is poised to take the credit.

The stimulus failed - the tax cuts worked. That is already their message, and they will probably start declaring victory in April, well before any significant tax cuts have taken effect.

[DirkGently]

7. "The stimulus failed -- the tax cuts worked." Exactly. We'll be fighting that message in 2012 now.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

8. you said it very well, hfojvt