hodad said:
JohnRoberts said:
[edit- raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will not help the economy, or help employment. just lead to fewer entry level positions and more automation... /edit]
JR
You have no hard data to back this up. I can tell you for a fact that lowering taxes on the wealthy doesn't help the economy--we've had a dozen or so years of that, and the only thing that's changed is that the rich are richer.
And how is the current anti-business environment working out?
This whole class warfare is a red herring. While not perfect 1:1 the highest incomes are earned by people creating the most wealth, they also create jobs as consequence of creating this wealth.
One universal truth about taxes is whenever you tax something you get less of it. This has long been applied for sin taxes to get less smoking or less drinking by taxing booze and e cigarettes. When you tax people creating wealth you get less wealth creation.
Government taking wealth and giving it to unproductive sectors of the economy will just dissipate that wealth. It may be a fun ride while it lasts but eventually you run out of "other peoples money".
And the poor, well, they're poorer. The concentration of wealth at the top has led to a stagnant economy with falling wages.
The stagnation is not caused by the concentration of wealth, but by anti-business policy in taxation and regulation, and even negative messaging. What business leader feels confident about the future and his costs.
You can not get blood from a stone, and forcing a Macdonalds to pay $10+ to menial workers, without the ability to raise the prices of the food enough to cover the extra cost, simply will not work. Instead we will see more automation and elimination of more of those jobs.
When I was a teen I worked for $1.25 /hr minimum wage (yes I'm old). These entry level jobs serve a useful purpose. Being a greeter at Walmart should not be the primary job of a family's bread winner. It is good job for some kid learning how to work, or some retiree to make a few extra bucks.
The fact that bread winners are working in these menial jobs is just more evidence of the administration's failed economic policy.
Cutting the estate taxes will do nothing but lead to a whole bunch more Paris Hiltons. And we all know what a job creator she is.
I did not suggest this, and heard an economist recently frame cutting the estate tax as undesirable because it would not change behavior, people would still die and accumulate wealth while alive. I dislike it when people inherit a family business and have to sell it because they can afford the taxes.
I think the government should claw back entitlement largess from estates when people die.
Your arguments rest on ideology, not reality.
Huh... While I concede economics is a soft science it is very much based on reality. I invite you to read The wealth of nations by Adam Smith, pretty much a catalog of facts that demonstrates how markets work. albeit hundreds of years ago, but the market economics is still the same.
It's easy to point at a Pfizer-Astra Zeneca merger, but the fact is most of these corporations are already hiding billions in the Caymans and other tax havens. And at some point they'll sucker another president into giving them a tax amnesty on all that hidden money, and just like last time it'll do nothing to stimulate the US economy.
No the point is that US corporate taxes are not competitive, even compared to UK, historically a higher tax nation than the US. Yes companies already have piles of money held off shore to avoid onerous tax laws here... We do not need to give business a better deal than other western countries, we just need to be competitive with other nations. It should not be a good use of their time to engineer tax avoidance. Level the playing field between US and other countries so business can spend 100% of their attention on growing their business, and we will see huge capital investment and job growth here.
If you want equality, look at Cuba... no productive business sector, everybody is poor..but equal.
Concentrating the wealth in the hands of the few is not working--it is a demonstrable failure, empirically proven. Your ideas may sound good in your head, but the empire's crumbling as your beloved plutocrats fiddle.
The irony is that Obama's policy and the current fed has increased the distance between wealthy and poor. The whole fed policy is to inflate assets (to avoid deflation), and the poor do not have assets (duh). Obama is talking the talk to get votes, but if he really cared for the poor he would support business and grow the economy creating more jobs. He is the most divisive leader I can remember.
I will be glad when he retires back to civilian life.
JR
@SSL yes Apple is the poster boy for tax avoidance, I think they are currently based in Ireland or something like that. We need to make all this financial engineering academic with a (more) level playing field. I doubt we can match the deals that Ireland set up when they were hurting, but we just need to match most major western countries to make it not worthwhile to do such deals just to reduce taxes..
