Inflation dropped to a negative rate for the first time in more than a decade and a half, the best news the poor and the elderly on fixed incomes have received in the same period. Unfortunately, the news media were too concerned about the disasters for the poor and the elderly under Reaganomics to notice.
Senator Gary Hart, who seems eager to run for President in 1984, is floating a “neo-liberal” economic platform. Much of it is familiar statist flotsam and jetsam, but Hart does have interesting proposals on taxes: he would slash corporate tax rates and replace the current personal income tax with a graduated tax on consumption. The Senator wants to encourage economic growth, which is laudable. But since he would use “progressive” individual taxes to replace “regressive” corporate taxes, his plan might actually tilt the tax system even further toward redistribution of income than now. And shifting the tax burden from productive firms to productive individuals not only does not mitigate that burden, but targets it where it does the most damage.
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