Jack Lew on Tax Cuts for Wealthy

Posted by admin on Sunday, April 12, 2015

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew Money Quotation saying that we tested tax cuts for wealthy and it hurt (or at least failed to help) the economy. Jack Lew said:

 

 

“We’re not doing things that we haven’t tested. We’ve had an experiment in this country. We had big tax cuts for very wealthy people and the economy did not do very well afterwards” — Jack Lew

 

 

In this quote, former Obama administration official Jack Lew is making a point about tax policy based on historical evidence. His view seems to be that large tax cuts heavily skewed towards very high income individuals, as enacted under previous administrations, failed to significantly boost broader economic growth when tested in practice.

Lew appears to be referring to tax changes in the early 2000s that disproportionately benefited the wealthy yet were followed by issues like rising inequality and the 2008 recession. His implication is that more balanced tax policies that do not overly favor the richest may have stronger, more sustainable impacts.

The quote conveys Lew’s perspective that past “experiments” provide lessons, and proposed changes should be informed by real-world results rather than theory alone in order to avoid replicating counterproductive approaches.