Category Archives: jobs

Corporate Tax Rate Cuts

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…must lead to Federal government tax revenue reductions. Or so Progressive-Democrats claim. Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden (D) won’t say it, though, so I will. It ain’t so, as this table from The Wall Street Journal illustrates.

When you leave money in the hands of private economy operators—individual or corporate—they do productive things with their money. That productivity leads to more R&D, more innovation, more physical capital improvement, physical capital expansion, wage increases, more jobs (which represent the mothers of all wage increases, for many, from zero wage to an actual paycheck), the latter two leading to human capital improvement, which leads to greater private economy demand for goods and services, which leads to greater production of those goods and services, expanding the economic virtuous circle.

In comparison, Government merely redistributes from one operator—individual or corporate—to another its collected revenues, producing very little. Even the redistributions to noneconomic operators—individuals on welfare, for instance—the resulting production has less value than the transferred funds. The recipients of those redistributions have very small demand increases from the redistributions since they start out with small demands: they’re unemployed or employed only in low-wage, low-value jobs, and all those redistribution payments do is trap those folks in those two statuses.

All of that is even before any discussion of any need for the tax revenues Big Government Progressive-Democrats claim exists.

Inflation and Wages

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In a Tuesday Wall Street Journal editorial, the editors talked at length and some depth about President Joe Biden’s (D) lies regarding today’s—actually, the last 15 months, the term of his Presidency—inflation as being all the Russian’s, Vladimir Putin’s, fault.

There’s an aspect of the Biden inflation that’s of particular interest though, and that’s the damage Biden is inflicting on us American workers.

[T]he overall price news is terrible for American workers and consumers. The March surge means that real wages fell 0.8%, or a decline of 2.7% in the last year. (See the nearby chart.) Real average weekly earnings fell a striking $4.26 in March alone, and they’ve fallen nearly $18 during the Biden Presidency.

The graph below illustrates the matter since March a year ago.

This is a lot like the previous Progressive-Democrat administration, that of ex-President Barack Obama (D). Real wages declined (though not as dramatically) during most of his time in office, also due to his and his Party cronies’ anti-business policies—which amounted to anti-worker policies.

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.

They Haven’t Taken Enough

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…so they want more. And more. And….

President Biden made a renewed push on Monday to galvanize congressional Democrats to overhaul the nation’s tax code and dramatically raise rates on corporations and ultra-wealthy Americans.
… Under his proposal, taxes would rise by $2.5 trillion….

And

The higher taxes would largely be borne by Wall Street and the top sliver of US households, in the form of a steeper corporate rate, a modified wealth tax….

That raised corporate tax rate is, in part, a withdrawal of the corporate tax cuts of the Trump administration, a reduction that made our companies globally competitive and brought their investments back home as well as encouraged increased foreign company investment in our nation. It’s also a net increase in rates over what existed prior to the Trump cuts.

That wealth tax includes a

minimum 20% tax on the incomes of US households worth $100 million or more

along with a tax on unrealized capital gains—that’s the “worth more” part. Those unrealized gains aren’t even income, either, since the assets experiencing the growth isn’t income.

Withdrawing all that money from the private economy is money that won’t be, can’t be, committed to R&D, other innovation, production facility improvement, production facility construction, wage and benefit increases for employees, job creation for additional employees, and on and on and on.

President Joe Biden (D) said his budget demands ensure that

corporations and the very wealthy pay their fair share.

Pay our fair share? What, I ask, is our fair share? Biden and his Progressive-Democrat cronies answer, “All that you have.”

Even one of the founders of the modern Progressive Movement, TR Roosevelt, might demur from this bit of confiscation:

Our country, this great Republic, means nothing unless it means the triumph…in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

That is the essence of the American Dream, but Biden-Harris and his cronies want to cap our Dream and punish us American citizens for being successful.

An Appellate Court Gets One Right

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The Tenth Circuit has issued a temporary injunction against President Joe Biden’s (D) rule requiring outdoor recreational groups under contract to the Federal government or doing their business on Federal property to pay their employees $15/hr, whether the value of those employees’ work output is that valuable or not.

The “plaintiffs have demonstrated an entitlement to relief from the minimum wage order in their particular circumstances,” the court ruled, and enjoined the government from enforcing the $15-an-hour minimum wage mandate, which recreational companies said would force some of them out of business.
The court also granted the request because it found the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits” and “suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief.”

The Pacific Legal Foundation had brought the case last fall, arguing that

the requirement amounts to “an executive power grab to force a social agenda through federal contractors.”

That power grab, as the PLF argued, is barred by our Constitution:

Only Congress can make law setting minimum wages. The president can’t establish a minimum wage through administrative fiat. The Constitution says that only Congress can make laws that bind the public.

Indeed. This is what Art I, Sect 1, makes that explicitly clear:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Biden-Harris knows this full well, as do his Cabinet Secretaries in on or otherwise supporting the grab.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party pushing its social engineering agenda with no regard for statute or Constitution—those are just speed bumps on their road to control.