Can someone help me out here?

Barack points out that the budget deficits from this last year may run to 1.2 trillion. When GWB was sworn in in 2001 he inherited a surplus almost a quarter of a trillion from Bill Cllinton. One of his first actions was to return this surplus to "the American People" through a series of tax cuts. Well, we know where these cuts went. Now President-elect Obama is rightly pointing out that he and the Congress must act quickly and massively to provide a stimulus to this wrecked economy of around 800 billion dollars. He is also talking about keeping the Bush tax cuts in place and re-examining the entitlement programs. I don't quite understand this. Weren't these tax cuts aimed largely at the upper income groups on the theory that these people were the most productive elements of our society and weren't these cuts partly responsible for the growing disparity between the rich and everyone else? So eight years later instead of an economy that is booming, we have an economy that is busting. On some levels I understand the theory put forward by John Maynard Kenyes given the the present state of affairs, but to exacerbate the size of the deficit by continuing to tax higher income people at artificially low rates seems to me irresponsible and counterproductive. Doesn't it make more sense to put this into the hands of people who need to spend. If the federal government had access to a reasonable tax on millionaires and billionaires, the stimulus could be larger and Social Security and Medicare could be preserved. So could those of you who have a better grasp of economics 101 tell me what Barack is doing here?