Daily Archives: 24 January 2018

More Jobs

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JP Morgan Chase says it’s going to spend its tax cut savings to

develop hundreds of new branches in the US, increase wages and benefits for hourly US employees, make increased small business and mortgage lending commitments, add 4,000 jobs, and increase philanthropic investments.

Nor is this a one-shot affair.  It’s a five year, $20 billion investment.  So much for pocketing the money and cutting out charity work, the loud Leftist refrain during the debates over tax reform.

As an aside, the pay raises are good and so are the additional jobs implied by the additional branches—400 of them (against an existing 5,130 branches, an 8% bump, which is also good for consumers)—openings.  But frankly, for my money, the additional jobs are more valuable than the pay raises for the existing employees.  The latter are getting a larger piece of the pie, which is good, but the former are getting their first slice—and making the pie itself bigger.

Here’s another datum.  Kim Lopdrup, Red Lobster’s CEO, is saying

Tax cuts, that’s clearly going to be stimulatory for the economy. We think that’s going to be great for the restaurant business[.]

More money left in the coffers of a small-margin business like a restaurant?  Yewbetcha.

Certainly, a couple of data points are little more than anecdotes, not a trend.  But they are promising anecdotes and well worth watching to see whether a trend develops.

This is the sort of thing, though, that the Progressive-Democratic Party opposed when they fought so hard against the just-passed tax reform bill.  It’s almost like they want Americans trapped in the Progressive-Democrat welfare cage.

Taxing and Spending in New York

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Bookending (in more than one sense of the term) California’s move to confiscate business’ tax cuts, New York’s Progressive-Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo wants to increase the taxes levied on that State’s citizens by $1 billion.  He’s claiming, in all seriousness,

You can’t possibly get anywhere near where you want to be on education and health care unless you raise revenues.  It’s just too big a deficit, and the choice of cutting education or cutting health care I don’t think is a place anyone wants to go to this year. So you have to raise revenue.

This is a false choice.  The largest cause of the State’s deficit, after all, is its spending level, not the size of its revenue.  Thus, one choice Cuomo is carefully eliding is this: the State’s government could cut spending across the board; there is, after all, more going on in New York than just education and health coverage costs.

Alternatively (which Cuomo also avoids mentioning), the State’s government could simply reallocate existing spending into education and health care.

Still another alternative unmentioned, the State’s government could fix its runaway pension funds for its public unions by using accurate projections of investment return rates and increasing the contributions union members and the unions themselves make to the funds.  Along with this, the State’s government could fix its health coverage program, replacing its version of Obamacare with market-based solutions, and freeing the citizens to buy the health plans that suit them rather than suiting Government.  Or not buy at all.

There’s simply no need for more revenue for the State’s government, no need to take even more money out of the pockets of the State’s citizens.

Unfortunately, neither the man nor his Party cronies in the legislature are emotionally capable of conceiving of actually cutting spending, or even of reallocating existing spending.