With the end of 2010 drawing near, there is plenty of talk emanating from the White House about the current tax situation. President Obama plans on letting the tax cuts for wealthier individuals in the country expire. Obama should stick to this decision:  letting the Bush tax cuts expire is the best decision for our troubled nation.

            The cuts Bush signed in reduced taxes for Americans. At the end of 2010, however, all the cuts are set to expire. Obama currently plans on extending tax cuts for the middle class, but letting tax cuts expire for individuals who make $200,000 a year and families who make $250,000 a year or more in annual taxable income.

            The majority of Republicans support the continuation of tax cuts for the wealthy, while Democrats are for letting the tax cuts expire.

            “The hope of the Republicans would be that as [the wealthy] spend their money, it creates jobs for other people,” Terry Geogheogan, government teacher, said. “Say a wealthy person buys a truck; when people buy trucks, the makers hire more people to make the trucks, which would create jobs.”

            The Republicans support this idea of trickle down economics, meaning if you let people spend their money freely into businesses, it will trickle down to the masses and create jobs for others.

            But the trickle down theory trickled out, and the economy hasn’t gotten any better since the cuts were put into place.

            “Most people used their extra money to pay down their debts,” Chris Bennett, economics teacher, said. “In 2003 when the government paid everyone $300 (due to the budget surplus), everybody just used it to pay off their credit cards.”

            The Republicans only assume people would spend their money. Especially in a recession, more people are holding onto their money in fear of going broke. If they do not spend the money they don’t pay in taxes, then basically the tax cuts are hurting our government, because the government isn’t gaining money in taxes, nor through trickle down economic growth.

            Although extending the tax cuts would not stimulate the economy, according the to Congressional Budget Office, if the trickle down theory worked as planned the extension of the cuts would cause a small rise in Gross Domestic Product, the measure of a country’s economy. For every dollar spent, GDP would rise about 10-40 cents. However, if the tax cuts are left to expire, the government could more efficiently use the money brought in through taxes to aid the states, cover insurance for the unemployed, and create more jobs.

            If anything, the government should place heavier taxes on the top three percent of the population more than the average taxpayer because they are the wealthiest people in the country, so they have extra money to spend. America is about equality, so is it really fair for somebody to be extremely rich while others who are fighting for jobs have to struggle to get by?

            Republicans also worry that letting the tax cuts expire will hurt small businesses.

            As Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said in a September Washington Post article, letting the tax cuts expire would cause a “job- killing tax hike on small businesses during rough economic times.”

            Hatch claims small businesses will be hit hard by taxes without the cuts to keep their businesses afloat, however, since the tax cuts only cut taxes for the wealthier people in the nation, the vast majority of small businesses will not be affected by letting the tax cuts expire. In fact, the only way the tax cuts would hurt businesses, is if people do not spend their money into the economy.

            Under these tax cuts for the past nine years, the economy has not changed. Obama must let these tax cuts expire, because if they have not strengthened our poor economy in the past nine years, they definitely will not change after 2010.

            The government is ready for a change, and that is exactly why the tax cuts should expire at the end of 2010. Nothing good has come of the Bush tax cuts except for our economy being pushed farther into recession. Taxing the wealthy would bring in a substantial amount of money, which the government could use to repair our broken economy.