Fresh Air: Did US Tax Policies Increase Economic Inequality ... by gimleteye

We live in a time unequalled for both complexity and the poor skills of the American public to grasp anything beyond 30 second sound bites delivered for political campaigns. Consider the impasse of the "super-committee" in Congress, meant to shave a trillion from the federal budget. The failure is attributable to the Tea Party/Grover Norquist wing of the Republican party, unwilling to compromise on tax hikes for the wealthiest Americans.

What is needed to evaluate the current debate-- if it can be called that-- is historical context of modern US tax policies. If you have a half hour to spare and care to be educated, listen to the Terry Gross interview with Rolling Stone political correspondent, Tim Dickinson.  (Fresh Air is carried on the local PBS affiliate, WLRN.)

Tax cuts, says Dickinson, weren't always the center of Republican policy. From the end of World War II through the Reagan administration, he says, Democrats and Republicans fought over social spending but largely stayed away from taxes.

"Traditionally, Republicans cared deeply about fiscal balance," he says. "So you fought over balance — and taxes were an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to pay the bills. And tax policy wasn't meant to prod and stimulate the economy because prosperity came from the private sector. So the GOP focus on tax policy was not to give the economy a boost, but to find a nondestructive way to raise the revenue that [the government] decided it needed."

The biggest tax cut during that era, says Dickinson, was made by Democratic President John F. Kennedy. Republicans largely opposed it. "[They] were concerned that this was going to create deficits that werunwieldy," Dickinson explains. "This was consistent with the ideas that Republicans held that their duty in the system was to keep the nation's books in balance."