Obama’s tax cuts forgotten in midterms- as they are temporary- Obama News- Business

Obama News, Tax Cuts, Business News, Election 2010

From: http://blog.heritage.org

The New York Times asked yesterday: What if a president cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed? the author Michael Cooper goes on to report:

In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.

In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know.

But who can blame them? The Obama tax cuts were not productive tax cuts. While Cooper does mention that Americans were allowed to take home slightly higher paychecks, he also completely fails to mention that the policy is temporary. Heritage analyst Rea Hederman explained why this matters before the stimulus even became law:

Most people know that this tax cut will last only two years, just as they knew that last year’s rebate check was a one-time event. They know that in future years, the deficit will have to be repaid via higher tax rates. This makes workers even less likely to spend the additional money, because individuals prefer to have a constant consumption path. The permanent income and life cycle theories developed by Milton Friedman and Franco Modigliani respectively say that permanent increases in income increase consumption considerably more than a temporary increase does, because the decision to consume depends on an individual’s real wealth, not current real disposable income.