Republicans propose to borrow money from the Chinese to give to the richest Americans!

House minority leader, Representative John Boehner, who fought against extending unemployment benefits to America’s unemployed workers wants to make the $1.7 trillion Bush tax cuts, 50% of which went to the richest 1%, permanent.

President Obama has proposed keeping the tax cuts for 95% of Americans, but allowing the tax breaks for those making over $250,000 to lapse, returning to the rates of the Clinton era. The 1990's top marginal tax rates were slightly less than one third the rates of the high growth 1950s and roughly 40% of the rate in the '60s and '70s when the economy grew at much faster rates than it has since the nation embraced supply side ideology in 1981.

Boehner, employs the same rationale used by President Bush to win approval of the cuts in 2001 and 2003, arguing that extending the tax breaks to high income earners is necessary to revive the economy.

The result of the Bush era tax cuts: the weakest period of economic growth and job creation since the Great Depression, culminating in the real estate bubble and the Great Recession.

A New Jersey Star Ledger editorial entitled “On tax policy Republicans have lost their way” notes:

Extending these tax cuts would force the treasury to borrow an additional $700 billion over the next decade. What Republicans are suggesting is this: Let’s borrow money from the Chinese and hand it over to the Americans who need it least. More than half of the money would go to those earning at least $2 million a year.”

We’ve been down this road before and it did not work. Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.

The entire editorial is linked.