ELECTION MESSAGE RECEIVED!

It’s been called an election without substance — all smoke and mirrors.

Actually, we think this election was pretty clear on the big issues. The exit polling questions/answers told us where the country stands on women’s rights, immigration reform, war, a balanced approach to deficit reduction, the basic civil right to vote, and at the same time the exit polls demonstrated huge passion among our young voters and the NEW majority demographic — non-whites!

And there has been a truly strong, and epic shift among the American people in our attitudes toward taxes. For over 30 years taxes have been demonized as baaaaaad! But, after 4 years of the GOP screaming, “deficits are bringing our country down” out of one side of their mouths, followed quickly by a shout of, “we need to cut taxes by 20%,” it appears that at least ONE of their conflicting positions has won the hearts of the voters.

It’s pretty logical, after all, and the American people seem to get it: if deficits are a danger to our long range economy, then lowering taxes — especially on the already-wealthy who don’t need them — would surely make the deficit worse. Kinda hard to argue with that!

The GOP mantra that “cutting taxes for the rich will grow the economy (jobs) in our country, and the wealth will trickle-down to the rest of us,” has been pretty much de-bunked.

The recent, non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report concludes, “The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.”

And the voters seem to be convinced that the GOP “trickle-down theory” has been a hoax. The exit poll answers made clear that raising taxes on the uber wealthy is favored as a way to help lower deficits, and that attacking our social safety-net while at the same time lowering taxes for the already-rich would NOT be acceptable to voters.