Will Proposed Tax Cuts Create New Jobs?

Tax cuts used as a clerical means to stimulate economic growth should be made from the bottom up, instead of from the top down. If you live at or below the average living-wage index, then the very income you need to survive is not taxed. If you are barely making ends meet, any boost in cash flow (i.e., tax cuts) will typically be spent. A demand is created. More services and more consumable and durable goods are needed to satisfy that demand. There are your “more jobs.”

In our president’s closed world of wealth and privilege, most of the tax cuts go to the most wealthy. The cornerstone is the logic that they’ll give their newfound added wealth away (i.e., creating jobs) to fuel a nonexistent surge in economic demand. How so many can be persuaded to stray so far from simple reason is a quirk of human nature that is deeply amazing.

Gary Adams

Oceano, Calif.

*

The Times’ May 13 editorial “Making the Jobless Pay” subscribes to the same canard that many liberals hold so dear: that the poor and not the so-called rich will stimulate the economy if given tax relief. This assumes that the “rich,” meaning those earning $100,000 or more a year, will not buy capital equipment and hire more workers if given the means to do so.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that I have held many jobs in my life and have never been hired by a poor person.

Greg Givens

Redondo Beach

*

It sounds like Congress has decided to go along with much of President Bush’s tax cut proposal (May 16). The Senate’s proposed tax cut, $350 billion, would go a long way toward putting people to work, and thereby bettering the economy, if it was applied to a public works program. This amount of money would provide nearly a million people with $35,000-per-year jobs for the next 10 years. It could help improve schools by hiring teachers; further clean-up projects, social programs and other improvements in low-income neighborhoods; increase the staff of hospitals and improve other elements of the national infrastructure.

Instead, most taxpayers might each receive a tax refund of $400 (if we’re lucky), and the unemployed and minimum-wage workers will still be unemployed and poor.

Howard Schlossberg

Woodland Hills

*

Social Security and Medicare funds should not be placed at risk to finance an unfair tax cut for millionaires.

Ann Maupin

Los Angeles