Good Economic News You Won't See in the New York Times

With the exception of the New York Times story regarding the declining Federal deficit, I bet you won't see the rest of this economic story reported in that paper or the rest of the mainstream media.

Former Delaware Governor Pete Dupont tells it this way in Opinion Journal:

John F. Kennedy believed that "an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits." So he proposed income tax rate reductions, which the Democratic Congress enacted the year after JFK's death. Back then, Democrats were for them: more than 80% of Democratic senators and representatives voted for the Kennedy tax cuts.

My, how times have changed. Today the Democratic Party is so vehemently opposed to income tax cuts that when President Bush's reached their final vote in May 2003, only 4% of Democratic legislators (2 of 48 senators and 7 of 205 representatives) voted "yes."
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Mr. Bush signed the most recent tax cuts into law in the spring of 2003. In the past 33 months the size of America's entire economy has increased by 20%--or, as National Review Online's Larry Kudlow put it, "In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy."

In the 2 1/4 years before the 2003 tax cuts, economic growth averaged 1.1% annually; in the three years since it has averaged 4% per year, and in the first quarter of this year it was 5.6% on an annualized basis. Inflation-adjusted per capita GDP has grown 7.8% from 2003 through the first quarter of this year.

According to the government's establishment survey, in the 36 months since the tax cuts became law, 5.3 million new jobs have been added to the economy. According to its employment survey, 288,000 jobs were added in May and 387,000 in June. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.1% when the bills were signed to 5.4% at the end of 2004 and 4.6% today, and the rate has gone down for men, women, blacks and Hispanics. Hourly wage rates for workers are up 3.9% in the past year, and they increased at an annualized rate of 4.6% in the second quarter of this year, the highest quarterly rate in nearly 10 years.

Incomes are up too. As Stephen Moore noted in The Wall Street Journal, "the percentage of Americans earning more than $50,000 a year rose from 40.8% to 44.2%" between 2002 and 2004. As for very wealthy families, the portion of total income "captured by the richest 1%, 5% and 10% of Americans is lower today than in the last year of the Clinton administration."
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But President Bush's tax reductions have been the most successful economic growth and opportunity work of any president in a quarter of a century. To paraphrase JFK, tax rate reduction is indeed a rising tide that lifts all individuals to greater opportunity.

As we head toward the November election. Keep the differences between Republicans and Democrats on national security and the economy at the top of your list. Results matter. Rhetoric does not.