Kerry's Tax Policy Will Destroy Growth, Warns Evans

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, Washington

18 March 2004

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s wish to reverse many of the tax cuts passed by the Bush administration would destroy job creation and growth, Commerce Secretary Don Evans argued on Tuesday.

Speaking on the Fox News Channel’s ‘Hannity and Colmes’, Evans commented: "Time and again, you can demonstrate when you cut taxes, you get the incentives in the right place to create jobs. If you raise taxes, which apparently Senator Kerry has promised to do, you destroy jobs."

John Kerry recently announced that he intends to “return tax fairness to America,” if elected to the presidency, by restoring the Clinton era tax rates for taxpayers with incomes of more that $200,000 per year. “With George Bush’s tax cuts, the top one percent of taxpayers have received almost forty percent of the breaks. Meanwhile middle class working people have seen their share of the tax burden go up, not down,” Kerry claimed in a recent speech.

However, the Commerce Secretary begged to differ: "When President Bush cut taxes on the highest marginal tax rate, 75% of that savings went to the job creators of America - the small business owners. So conversely, if you raise taxes on the same group, you're going to be hitting the small business owners, the entrepreneurs of this country, that are the job creators."

Thanks to President Bush’s tax cuts, Evans said that the US economy is “very, very electric right now” and he envisaged continuing strong growth in the future.

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