Tax Cutting Efforts to Boost the Economy

* I must not allow your readers to be misinformed by James Flanigan’s Dec. 21 news analysis, “Tax Cuts May Be Just What Economy Needs,” in which he writes that “some members of Congress” note that tax cuts worked “during the Reagan administration in 1981.”

In June 1981 Ronald Reagan got his huge tax cut passed. By November unemployment was at a six-year high. A few days later, his own budget director, David Stockman, stated that supply-side economics was a “Trojan horse” designed to benefit the rich. By the fall of 1982, over a year later, 9 million Americans were out of work and the nation was in its worst recession since the Great Depression.

This is what our financially prudent Congress attributes the upturn to?

DOUG HALL

Culver City

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As usual, reduction of the national debt is completely ignored. If we are slipping into a recession, then we need a low national debt to pay our way out of it. I note that the Federal Reserve Board was used as a reference, but Flanigan did not say that the Federal Reserve prefers lowering the debt rather than lowering taxes.

But the cutest statement is economist Albert M. Wojnilower’s, that upper-income taxpayers really need this tax cut. Going back further than we care to talk about, the rich have continued to get richer while the poor continually get poorer. Tax cut for the rich? The next thing we will be hearing is the trickle-down theory.

J.D. KEITHAHN

San Juan Capistrano

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As the curtain falls on Bill Clinton’s presidency, he leaves the nation in terrible shape. We are certainly headed into a Clinton- and Greenspan-managed recession. And if the Arabs decide to cut our oil supply, this could turn into a long-lasting depression.

Clinton’s efforts to broker peace in the Middle East have failed miserably. Government regulators have taken a wrong turn in every area. Here in California we have an energy crisis that didn’t need to happen. The country is polarized on most of the important issues and it will take many years to sort these things out. Why anyone would want to be president in these times is beyond me.

SION COLVIN

Woodland Hills

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President-elect George W. Bush is doing a pretty good job so far, spouting the Republican Party line exactly the way they want him to. Why else would he make a blatant statement to the press about an “impending” slowdown in the economy when the fact of the matter is still very much up to the winds of fate, as it always is? Could it be he wants to be able to say he told us so while Clinton was still president and that only he can save us? Let’s face it: Bush is just as driven by polls, media stories and partisan rhetoric as he claimed Al Gore was. What else is new?

BOB LOZA

Burbank