Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Platte River President* on Economics



By now, you've surely heard Obama's collectivist rant, that if you were successful, you didn't do it on your own. He seems to be channeling the original Fauxcahontas, Elizabeth Warren, who said:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for."

Got that? If you are rich, if you are successful, you didn't do it on your own, you got a lot of help from the public** who financed the infrastructure. But, have you ever driven by a strip mall, where one or more of the tenants, but not all of them had gone out of business? Or driven by two businesses side by side where one was open for business and the one right next door was shuttered and boarded up?

Didn't the same roads and bridges supply both businesses? Didn't the same schools educate those who worked in the strip mall? The same fire and police protect them all?

Mr. President, Ms. Fauxcahontas: Did you ever consider that since the same infrastructure is there for both those who succeed and those who fail, that maybe there's something else to whether or not a business succeeds than merely the community infrastructure? And it is possible that some of that something, that allows one man to keep his doors open and make payroll every week, can be weakened, or crippled or even killed off by taxes that are too high.

Raising taxes on businesses makes them less competitive, more likely to fail and less likely to expand and hire more workers. The way to get the economy back on its feet is to stop the frivolous and wasteful government spending, (as you promised when you ran for office in 2008, Mr. Obama) and lower taxes across the board.

But you are on the record as wanting to raise taxes for the sake of "fairness", even if the end result is an equality of misery.


* The Platte River was once said to be a "mile wide and an inch deep". Yeah. That fits!

**The more successful members of the public already paid more than their less successful brethren.

2 comments:

  1. Your double asterisk point is worthy of it's own post: Those who were successfully creating wealth, creating commerce and creating jobs by their own efforts, certainly were generating more taxable income than those who were not doing so.

    Therefore they contributed more to those roads than others. Consequently they should be able to argue that others in society were benefiting more from private efforts to grow their business than those who were exerting themselves. Why? The rate return on investment when the investment is small, or zero, is astounding. The payback for the job creating business is substantially smaller.

    Rather than being admonished, those businesses should be thanked for their disproportional contribution to those roads and bridges etc.

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