More tax thoughts

Sticking with taxes, here is an op-ed in today's USA Today by Sen. Bill Frist on the subject:

Ever since the Senate approved the last major tax relief bill, in 2003, revenues have increased every year. In 2004, they went up 5.5%. Last year, they rose 14.5%, the largest increase in nearly 25 years.

Total government collections, in fact, increased more after President Bush's 2003 tax cuts than they did after President Clinton's 1994 tax hikes.

He also shows that it pays to be skeptical about revenue forecasts:

Republicans' decision to reduce taxes on capital gains and dividends provides a good case study in effective tax policy. When we enacted these measures in 2003, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that revenues would decline by $27 billion over the next two years. Instead, it turned out that the tax cut stimulated investment and increased revenues by $26 billion — a $53 billion difference.

That difference, by the way, provides enough money to fund the entire Department of Justice for more than two years.

As I keep saying, Democratic rhetoric aside we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.

Update: Oh yeah, forgot to mention that I've been skimming the recently-released 2006 Economic Report of the President. Found this to be interesting:

...the United States has a combined (Federal and state) marginal corporate income tax rate of 39 percent, well above the OECD average of 30 percent, and second highest to that of Japan.

Which is totally weird to me because I thought that, you know, the corporations run everything in Amerika. Guess they like paying taxes.

Lastly, this is a nugget worth chewing over:

Since [the Tax Reform Act of 1986] (which closed loopholes in exchange for rate reductions), there have been more than 100 different acts of Congress making nearly 15,000 changes to the tax code.

Yikes.