WH Takes Issue With Bush-Era Tax Cut Figures

With the White House signaling it intends to repeal the Bush-era tax cuts on the highest wage-earning Americans, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) figures support the cuts while prompting scorn from Press Secretary Jay Carney, reports Humanevents.com.

 

When Human Events confronted Carney with OMB figures showing the tax cuts actually produced the highest two-year tax revenue increase in the preceding 40 years in the years 2004 through 2006, Carney dismissed the numbers, saying they were only a convenient “slice” of the figures.

 

The press secretary went further when characterizing the  two-year period as “the slowest period of economic expansion in modern time, that middle-class incomes stagnated or declined, that the wealthiest Americans got substantially wealthier, and that overall in that eight-year period there was substantial — there was rather anemic job creation.

 

“I would take issue of taking that slice,” Carney told Human Events, “and suggesting that somehow . . . the massive tax cuts did not contribute to our deficit, because they unequivocally did, and that those tax cuts created or were responsible for what, by any measure, was an anemic period of economic growth.”

 

Carney did not elaborate further regarding his reasoning for disputing the federal agency’s figures and how the subsequent tax cuts added to the deficit.