Tag Archives: GDP

In a recent op-ed piece a business owner made an incredible statement. "My business would be hurt far more by allowing the tax cut for America’s most fortunate to continue and instead slashing budgets for things like public education, research and infrastructure to pay for them."

Nice rhetoric but completely wrong on every point. Federal income taxes are not even close to the most important component of education spending. Public education is funded primarily by state and local taxes. Infrastructure, especially roads and bridges, are funded mostly by special taxes designed to collect money from people and businesses that use them. And the notion that Federal budgets have been slashed totally ignores the fact that Federal spending is up a trillion dollars since 2007. Which budgets have been slashed? Federal spending as a percent of GDP is at its highest level in history save for WWII. The claim that programs are being starved is nothing if not hilarious.

The writer is obviously concerned about Federal tax revenue not keeping up with the nation’s spending binge. But the primary reason for depressed tax revenue is the weak economy that has not responded to the bulge in Federal spending as we were promised it would by the President and his people. Moreover, the policies of regulation and the threats of higher taxes coming out of DC are depressing private sector investment and growth. It is important to remember that the USA has one of, if not the, highest corporate tax rates on the planet. And the magnitude of the final real costs of Obamacare is still unknown both in terms of direct expense for employees for health care costs and for compliance.

The notion held in some quarters that allowing the tax cuts to be eliminated for those making over $250,000 is going to solve the nation’s fiscal crisis is irrational. That will not raise nearly enough money in a depressed economy and will have a chilling effect on business growth. The tax raisers are forever and always disappointed when higher rates fail to produce more revenue. But they never learn.

Getting more people on private sector payrolls is the only sensible answer to our fiscal woes, Federal or local. Current and prospective policies in DC are pushing in exactly the opposite direction. It is too bad and very sad that some folks can be successful in the private free enterprise system and still have so little understanding of what makes the system great or have so little respect for keeping free enterprise free and as unfettered as possible. A look at France, Greece or Spain might help them but the writer of the op-ed in question is too busy linking things together fallaciously to take a look elsewhere to see what happens in the world he thinks would be better than ours.

Finally, the typical ignorant comment about the need to spend ever more money on public education in the country fails abominably to see what is happening in public education in Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and other cities. Seven percent of Westinghouse 11th graders are proficient in math. The majority of Chicago students are unable to function at grade level. Lack of spending? Over $20,000 per pupil in Pittsburgh and the nation’s second highest paid teachers in Chicago. How many more tax dollars must be thrown at these failed school systems to satisfy the business man who thinks we are under taxed?

Acquiring some actual knowledge about the world and how it works could go a long way to correcting the thinking of the business owner.