The Brookings Institute is a left-wing think tank.

Moreover, you are doing a bait and switch with your argument. We can argue all day long whether tax cuts for the wealthy create deficits or not. My answer to that is "it depends" on how much of a tax cut it is and under what circumstances.

But your issue had to do with helping the economy. Tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, help the economy. That's not a matter of opinion. That is self-evident fact.

Higher taxes on the wealthy will worsen this.

Here's what happens:

Taxes, for the wealthiest Americans, are simply another form of expense that they deal with. If you increase their expenses, you increase the incentive to find more profitable ways to keep doing what they're doing. One way to do that is to move operations overseas.

Bush's policies certainly haven't helped or hurt with regards to tech jobs moving overseas. He didn't do anything to help an already bad situation but he also didn't do anything to hurt.

But if you raise taxes, you will unquestionably cause more outsourcing.

Simply stating something to be a truth doesn't make it a truth.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone support the argument that middle class tax cuts would have much of an effect.  The middle class doesn't pay enough in taxes to make a cut do much.

The top 25% (i.e. "upper class") pay 85% of the taxes. The remaining 75% pay the last 15%.  So I'm not sure exactly on what basis you think that a middle class tax cut would do this stimulating.

Moreover, the middle class would simply consume such a tax cut by purchasing commodities. While that's nice for retailers and manufacturers (increasingly foreign as you regularly point out) it doesn't have much long-term impact. Once the money has been consumed, it's gone.

The upper class, by contrast, generally makes their money by producing things (making stuff, moving stuff, growing stuff). Tax cuts provide more capital for them to invest in what they are doing which creates jobs, higher profits and in the long term more taxes.