Ampersand Duck has a book meme with the following rules:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
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My contribution is from Forbes’ Flat Tax Revolution:
Fifth Sentence:
“When attempting to assess the likely impact of proposed tax policies, the government’s use of static analysis has translated into consistent cluelessness - generating misinformation that is all too often accepted, without question, by the media and general public”
Following 4 sentences: (assuming points within a sentence is part of parent’s sentence)
“Some examples:
- In 1989, Bob Packwood (R-OR) requested a revenue forecat from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) on a hypothetical tax increase raising the top rate to 100 percent on incomes over $200,000. The JCT responded by forecasting increased revenues of $204 billion in 1990 and $299 billion in 1993. Essentially, the JCT predicted that people would continue to work even if the government taxed them out of every penny they earned.
- The Congressional Budget Office predicted that the 1986 corporate tax rate increase would raise government revenues from $89 billion to $101 billion. In reality, corporations altered business practices and revenues decreased to $84 billion.
And these are only two examples.
The truth is that our federal government has consistently and grossly underestimated tax collections that result from tax cuts and overvalued the so-called windfalls in revenue expected from tax increases.
The 1986 capital gains tax hike from 20 percent to 28 percent did not result in higher revenues. “
Additional sentence to provide context:
” Instead, realized gains jumped from $172 billion to $328 billion the year before the increase and fell dramatically in the years following it, to $112 billion in 1991″
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