If there’s one group of people that love the Simpson-Bowles plan to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits while lowering the corporate tax rate, it’s billionaires and corporate CEO’s.
Take JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon. He told a recent meeting of Washington elites at the Council on Foreign Relations that the economy “would be booming” if President Obama had enacted the Simpson-Bowles plan.
Recall that the Simpson-Bowles plan would reduce corporate tax rates to 26 percent. As Nobel economist Paul Krugman notes, there is a “complete absence of evidence” that doing this would grow the economy in any way. And hiking the Social Security retirement age, as Simpson-Bowles suggests, would make it more difficult for those 65 and over to get jobs due to age discrimination, and wouldn’t have the positive effect of opening up more employment that lowering the age would.
Dimon should just be honest. He likes the Simpson-Bowles plan because it would reduce his megabank’s tax rate even further, and would cut important social insurance programs in a way that would allow banks and other corporations to step in and offer private services that are much more expensive. The public should not be fooled.
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