Daily Archives: 22 December 2011

Big Government’s Taxes

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Progressives like to assert that their tax and spend programs are good for job creation and good for jobs, generally.  This actually is a testable claim, and we have an ongoing experiment of the thesis in Illinois.  How’s this working out for the Illini?  The Wall Street Journal has in interim report.

At the start of this year, the Progressives in control of the Illinois state government rammed through a $2 billion tax increase: the corporate tax rate exploded by 30% (the personal income tax was worse, a 67% increase, but that’s for another time).  Naturally this has no effect on jobs or job creation goes the Progressive hypothesis.  It’s almost true for the Big Businesses favored by Illinois’ Big Government.  The Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have received from Uncle Patty Quinn’s generosity $85 million in tax breaks if only they’ll keep their jobs in Chicago and not relocate to another state.  Sears Holdings Corp. is the beneficiary of $15 million in tax credits for the same reason.  Santa Quinn has, in rough total, handed out $500 million in goodies to some 80 Big Businesses if only they’ll keep their jobs in Illinois.  That’s actually a relatively small sum, only a bit over six-tenths of one per cent of that $2 billion tax hike.  But it’s not chump change for the companies getting this special dispensation.

And it’s not chump change for all the mom and pops and other small and medium businesses who have to pay all of that tax hike because they can’t afford the Progressives’ vig.  The solution for them?  Hit the bricks.  Or see their friendly neighborhood community organizer.

Did this job-creating and budget-fixing tax rise achieve its purpose?  The Illinois Policy Institute says that over the next 15 years, the revenue lost from all these special corporate tax deals, along with the revenue lost from companies (big and small) departing, will exceed the monies raised from the increase.  And the budget deficit hasn’t gotten any smaller.

On another note, we have this, from Lawrence Lindsey in his 1990 The Growth Experiment: How the New Tax Policy Is Transforming the U.S. Economy:

Politicians who assert their role in directing funds to the “industries of the future” want to play entrepreneur with someone else’s money. They are ill suited to the role. The politician who takes over the direction of capital is quickly revealed as this year’s amateur following last year’s experts.

Hmm….

Politics and Racism

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There has been some press in the last few days (actually, in the last few years) about the role of racism in political criticism.  I want to look at the record, in this non-scientific review, and see whether there’s anything to that press.

This is Presidential Candidate Obama’s view from the campaign trail:

They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. They’re gonna say, “You know what, he’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Here’s President Jimmy Carter’s view, from a 2009 interview:

I think an overwhelming portion of the intentionally demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man. That he’s African-American.

Here’s Keith Olbermann, from his 28 January 2010 “Worst Persons” segment of his Countdown show, describing various commentators that had remarked on President Obama’s State of the Union speech:

…our winners, these guys, assessing not the speech but the president himself.  Eric Erickson, “cocky”…. John Hood, “flippant” and “arrogant.” Glenn Beck, “like a punk.”

…the racist white guys revert to euphemisms and code words and among the code words that they think they’re getting away with are “cocky, flippant, punk, and especially arrogant.”

There’s this from an August 2011 interview with Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D, FL)”

TAMRON HALL: Let me get your response to David Axelrod saying the jobless issue, the unemployment issue, is not exclusive to one community.
FREDERICA WILSON: Well, it sounds good, but it is exclusive to one community….  Well, when you look at African-American males, 40% of them are unemployed, those under 30 years of age.  And I understand exactly that the entire nation must be involved in this recovery, but the black community is experiencing a great recession.  That’s what we’re experiencing.  And all of the growth in the past 30 years, we see it slipping away.  From home ownership, the middle class: it’s slipping away from our hands.  And it has a lot to do with a lot of issues: racism….

And this from our Attorney General, Eric Holder, in an interview from last weekend:

Mr. Holder said he believed that a few [of his “more extreme” critics] were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him.  “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

To which, Congressman Joe (R, IL) Walsh points out that Obama’s continued silence in the face of Holder’s…remarks…demonstrates that the president shares in the blame for the attorney general’s choice of words.

What’s interesting is who it is that’s hollering “racism” and what the hollerers are doing about the actual issues before them.  Besides hollering “racism,” I mean.