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Fair Tax Reform

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Submitted By zkzz
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The Case for Fair Tax Reform The current economic situation of the United States can be blamed on a multitude of variables and is the fault of numerous politicians from both parties as well as an abundance of special interest groups with lobbying power, not to mention several Presidential administrations. This paper will not examine all of these variables or individuals; it will concentrate on the isolated issue of tax reform on the highest earners and how it negatively affects the federal deficit and income inequality inside of the United States. What this paper will prove is that if the United States does not raise taxes on the highest earners, history shows that the divide between rich and poor as well as the divide between surplus and deficit will only widen into the future. When President Ronald Reagan shrank the tax brackets in 1987, it was the beginning of a new economic era. The theory behind cutting taxes on the richest people was that with extra money, the most profitable companies and taxpayers would invest their extra capital into the market and in the process create more jobs, expanding the economy. This may not have been the catalyst for the service economy revolution but it certainly coincided with it. A significant amount of opportunity cost was invested into foreign markets creating a cheaper workforce abroad, while domestically shrinking the labor market. According to MIT professor James Poterba, income inequality began to increase after the 1986 tax reform. According to research done by Poterba and Daniel Feenberg
The adjusted gross income for individuals in the top one percent of American taxpayers increased dramatically after the 1986 tax reforms, where marginal tax rates dropped from fifty percent to twenty-eight on the highest earners. Poterba and Feenberg observe that the reason that income inequality widened during this period

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