As is usual, the CRS produced a report at the behest of GOP Congresscritters in September of this year.
The Report is dated September 14th 2012 but never officially saw the light of day.
This has surely been extensively Diaried, but I couldn't find it so, for the record, here it is.
These reports are non-partisan. They are usually trusted and accepted as the truth. At least most of the truth depending upon the remit given to the analysts.
Both sides accept them, and if they are challenged at all it would normally be on the scope, rather than the facts.
If you don't like what the report says, you cannot really challenge the veracity because, as always, the headlines are in the summary. The methodology and analysis may indeed be inaccurate. That would be unusual but would depend upon the assumptions.
Whatever, at a time when Democrats were deriding the notion of "trickle-down" economics, it's a little embarrassing when a Congressional Research Service Report supports that view.
So they killed it ..... and as far as I am concerned, that was an act of blatant and inexcusable deception perpetrated on the American people.
I quote here the whole of the concluding remarks. It is only three paragraphs, but it isn't hard to see why the GOP think that the CRS is a hotbed of Marxists:
The report in it's entirety is here
The top income tax rates have changed considerably since the end of World War II. Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The average tax rate faced by the top 0.01% of taxpayers was above 40% until the mid-1980s; today it is below 25%. Tax rates affecting taxpayers at the top of the income distribution are currently at their lowest levels since the end of the second World War.
The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.
However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced—lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.
Emphasis mine - twigg
If you wondered how honest a picture that Republicans tried to portray during the election campaign ... then wonder no more.
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