Appearing as a panel member on Sunday's Face the Nation on CBS, Time magazine's Rana Foroohar - assistant managing editor in charge of economics and business - lamented that she was "sad" at how much taxes are being discussed as she asserted that "one thing that's not going to get us some kind of a growth boom is a tax cut," and then called for more government spending which she claimed would entice businesses into more economic activity.
Without clarifying that the recent political debate about taxes has been about preventing tax rates from increasing as the Bush tax cuts expire, Foroohar dismissed the effectiveness of tax cuts and explained her prescription for the economy:
Well, I think that the President would like to spend a lot more on infrastructure and education. This is what we need to be talking about right now. I'm actually sad that we're spending so much time talking about taxes because one thing that's not going to get us some kind of a growth boom is a tax cut. I mean, it hasn't worked in the last three or four years. It really hasn't worked since 2001 when you had much broader across-the-board tax cuts.
She continued:
We need to be focused on infrastructure spending, on how to get our roads in better shape and how to get our schools in better shape, and I think that if business saw that government was investing in this country and making it a place that you'd want to do business, then they would start spending some of that two trillion on their balance sheet.
Conservative commentator John Fund of the National Review and the American Spectator responded:
The problem is, four years ago, we had an enormous stimulus package which we were told a lot of it was going into infrastructure, and then, two years later, the President had to admit, in public, "Well, I was wrong. There are no shovel-ready jobs." So we've heard that story before. Words are easy in Washington. Watch what people do, not what they say.
-- Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center