This Was the Species that Was

I was somewhat agog to see some expressions of 'teabagging' sentiment (although toned-way-the-fuck-down and without the usual misspellings and whatnot) from close personal friends here on LJ. As should be clear by now, I don't have the slightest inclination to give the Obama administration a free pass on anything, but... well, I also don't care to criticize it for make-believe stuff. It hardly needs saying that the teabagging brouhaha was/is, by and large, an absurdity: truly malignant people feeding truly stupid people horseshit about Obama's socialist plans to tax them to death, and the latter believed every duplicitous word.

Say what you will about Obama and taxation and the federal budget and the economy in general, the economic downturn cannot by any stretch of the imagination be said to be the result of his administration's actions; and he has, to all appearances, behaved in a fairly Republican way on the issue of tax cuts and budgets. Yet there are poor and middle-class folks out there absolutely ready to shoot the bastard on sight for raising their taxes. Which he has not done and has no stated intention to do.

Of course the media (and yes, especially the liberal media) show us the most egregious examples of idiocy amongst the teabag brigade, and we eat it up with a spoon. It's in our nature to point at stupid humans and cluck and tut and say 'Poor inbred fuckers, bless their congenitally weak hearts'. But. Even smart people are jumping on the 'Obama is the Tax Devil' bandwagon. And I cannae figure out why or on what possible grounds.

So.

I'd love to hear any sort of meaningful conservative critique of Mr. Obama's plans and goals w/r/t taxation vis-à-vis Mr. Bush's record... even on back to Mr. Reagan. I look in vain for meaningful evidence that conservatives out there are doing something more than gainsaying a leftist (well, left-ER... well, the other party) administration for doing exactly what W did. I'm not convinced cutting $282 billion in taxes was a good thing, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what conservatives are complaining about w/r/t taxation.

I'm pretty skeptical about the supposed value of tax cuts to begin with. I have never seen a case laid out with compelling numbers to show that cutting taxes increases tax revenue or stimulates a flagging economy in a substantial way. It seems to be a mythology, an abstract model devised mid-20th century and adopted wholesale and without evidence of its efficacy by the Reagan crowd; thereafter all mounting evidence of its inefficacy seems to have been forcibly construed as evidence of its efficacy. Slavery is freedom, after all.

And I'm downright flabbergasted by the increasing obliviousness of the fedgov, in the last 35 years—with the exception of Mr. Clinton—toward deficit spending. I cannot help but think we are selling ourselves to the rest of the world with the idea that, when the world comes to collect, we'll pull out a big gun and tell them to fuck off. If the conservatives are trying to claim that Obama's spending is somehow out of control and that Mr. Bush was a paragon of fiscal prudence for 8 years, well... golly, you go right out and dump that tea, kids. Bless your hearts.

Lastly, does anybody know a handy intrawebs reference for the history of tax rates and the laws that have changed them? I've seen figures (strange figgas... weird figgas) that state that the Obama tax increase on the richest Americans will bring that rate back up to 70 percent of what it was under Ronald Reagan; but I need sourcing.