Thursday, May 10, 2007

Return Of The Economy Killers

This time around, an evaluation of at least one wave of tax-rate increases — whether on oil company profits or hedge-fund capital gains, or by way of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — will give investors the opportunity to view the coming stock market decline like an auto crash in slow motion. Current Democratic proposals to raise taxes are the equivalent of the ones imposed by President Nixon, and if those proposals come to fruition, the second decade of the 21st century may look just like the 1970s — with one caveat. Many foreign politicians have learned from their mistakes; they now know that socialist, redistributionist policies are economy killers. But since too many American politicians have not yet learned this lesson, our economy and financial markets will be stuck fighting bad policy from within, and supercharged competition from without.