Fully 62 percent of the tax cuts would go to the best-off tenth of all taxpayers. The flat tax idea is even more extreme. In fact, the huge tax cuts Reagan and Congress instituted in 1981 put the country into major debt, which we've only now pulled out of. Fortunately, this year, the Republicans' tax-cutting mania has lost steam. The public has been persuaded that it's better to use the money to pay down the national debt and to help out Social Security than to cut taxes.
Many people are also aware that all the government cutting over the years has taken a big toll.
Economist Robert Kuttner observes that excluding social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare, general government expenditures have dropped from 12.4 percent of gross domestic product to just 6.6 percent in 1998. State and local governments have been zapped too. California, where antitax fury led to passage of Proposition 13 back in 1978, used to have among the nation's best schools. Now the state's underfunded schools are rated as among the worst. In New York City, people who have been thrown off government assistance now rely on private soup kitchens and food pantries for sustenance.