To the Editor

You may have noticed that we have an election coming up. With that, one hot topic will be taxes. Based on their stubborn belief in trickle-down economics, most Republican politicians will continue to tell you that tax cuts are the solution to most of your problems.

The story goes that if you cut taxes on higher income groups, investors will have more money to invest which will provide money to companies to build more facilities which will hire more people who will pay more in taxes and result in increased government revenue. 

We have been testing this theory for over 30 years and the results are in. It doesn’t work!

The Reagan tax cuts resulted in unprecedented increases in the deficit during his eight years in office. The tax cuts and relaxed financial oversight during Bush2 led to the next great increase in national debt, middle-class bankruptcies and an international financial crisis. Only recently has the increase in annual deficit spending been reversed as we slowly emerge from the Bush Recession.

At the state level, Kansas and Louisiana have become the poster children for aggressive implementation of trickle-down. Both are economic train wrecks. The deep-red Kansas legislature even debated whether to ignore a valid ruling from their own Supreme Court regarding education funding rather than deal with the real cause of their budget disaster. Kansans threw out many of their trickle-down legislators in the recent primary.

So why hasn’t this worked? Nationally, we now have a concentration of wealth in the upper 1 percent that has not been seen since before the Great Depression of the 1930s. The last 20 years have seen the greatest transfer of wealth in U.S. history. Large corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash and buying other companies — not investing in new production capacity that would create jobs. 

Why is this? We are a consumer economy and the vast majority of consumers — the middle and lower economic classes — don’t have extra money to spend after paying for food and shelter. Companies will not invest in new production and employees if they don’t see an expanding market for their products. That market has been eliminated by implementation of trickle-down tax policies. 

The problem is made worse when legislatures use increased sales taxes to balance budgets. Sales taxes hit middle- and lower-income citizens worse than the wealthy. In North Carolina the vast majority of us pay more of our income in taxes (income and sales) than we did before Gov. Pat McCrory and Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, took charge.

The trickle-down theory has been tested for over 30 years and has been found to be false and dangerous. It’s time to move on and develop policies that invest in the 99 percent of citizens. Trickle down just doesn’t work.

John Gladden

Franklin