Are These People Stupid….or Evil?

Over the years, I have been blessed with being able to associate with very intelligent people and to learn from them and from reading. Some of the lessons learned from my parents and other family were absorbed, but then either forgotten or ignored if it suits my fancy. Growing up in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, I “learned” that if I wanted something, I should wait until I actually had the money before buying it.

That was one of those that didn’t suit my fancy. But, in my later years, I’ve come to really appreciate the wisdom passed to me, and with my own experience as to the opposite of that wisdom, it brings home the values that I was taught. While about all of my family were registered Democrats, and that I initially registered as one, later observations led me to change my political and philosophical views, and eventually my political registration.

The last President from the Democratic Party that agreed with most of my philosophies was John F. Kennedy. I also have to believe that if he were alive today, he would be a Republican. While it had been done before, I first remember JFK proposing and passing a tax cut, which resulted in MORE revenue to the U.S. Treasury. In Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he also proposed and got a tax cut passed. Prior to his presidency, many of those making a LOT of money were being taxed as high as 91%.

Then again, George W. Bush proposed and got tax cuts passed and enacted. In every one of those instances, revenues to the treasury increased. Just for the record, the same had occurred prior to my birth, but I just wasn’t aware of that. With tax cuts, businesses are more prone to expand their business, both in product development and in the hiring of new employees. Each new employee also pays taxes to the government and more profit to the company leads to more taxes from the company.

Plus, the additional movement of inventory and services causes additional profits (and hiring) by companies that distribute and sell those products and services. In contrast, tax INCREASES cause individual and companies to cut back on production and hiring.

With the fact of the increase in revenue to the government, why is it that many of those on the left want to decry that “Yeah, but what about the deficit?” It is simply a fact that if you SPEND more than you make, even in a period of revenue growth, you will have deficits. Now, who generally controls the purse strings in government? Yep, Congress has that constitutional control, and over the years they have generally gone on spending sprees, especially if they see more revenue.

It is apparently natural for them to believe, wrongly so, that those revenues will increase even more if they tax the rich. After all, we want to be “fair,” don’t we? Well, let me refer the reader back to a previous post of my blog, in which is a link to The Tax Foundation that shows that while the top 50% of taxpayers pay 97.3% of the tax and the bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay 2.7% of the overall taxes. Now, that doesn’t sound fair to me, so let me give you that link to my previous post:

http://ignoringthebarkingdogs.blogspot.com/2011/05/answers-to-readers-comment-part-1.html

Now, within the past week, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, made a comment to the effect that we needed to increase the taxes to the small businesses (mostly the top 3%). Testifying before the House Small Business Committee he said this:

“If you don't touch revenues and you leave in place the tax cuts for the top 2 percent that were put in place by President Bush, if you leave those in place and you're trying to bring our deficits down over time, then you have to do exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans and you have to shrink the overall size of government programs, things like education, to levels that we could not accept as a country,” said Geithner.”

Note the part in bold letters. He is concerned with cutting government programs. He mentions education, but the federal education dollars only amount to 8% or less of the overall education expenses in this country. The other 92% comes from state, county, and city taxes. Every dollar of taxation that the federal government does takes money away from states and local governments.

Now, let's get back to small businesses and the value they are and what they create. From the unlikely source of the Huffington Post, there was an article speaking to the Five Big Myths About American Small Businesses, written by Kristie Arslan, who is the Executive Director of the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE).

1. Most Americans work for large corporations - But large businesses only employ about 38 percent of the private sector workforce while small businesses employ 53 percent of the workforce. In fact, over 99 percent of employing organizations are small businesses and more than 95 percent of these businesses have fewer than 10 employees.

2. Job growth is driven by large employers - While corporations do employ many Americans, small businesses account for 64 percent of net new jobs created. Many of these new jobs are also new companies -- the startup rate in 2010 was the highest it has been in 15 years, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. More than half a million new businesses were created in 2010 as the poor economy and high employment rates have led more individuals into business ownership.

3. Lending is readily available for small businesses in large and small amounts - When President Obama signed the Small Business Jobs Act last May, much attention was paid to the $30 billion Small Business Lending Fund that would be made available to community banks, credit unions and community development funds. This funding helped address the fact that neither the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds nor industry bailouts specifically helped small businesses. Although the $30 billion in lending was authorized eight months ago, the Treasury Department has yet to distribute these funds.

4. Self-employed business owners get all the same tax benefits as larger businesses - Businesses have a seemingly infinite ability to "write-off" certain expenses on their corporate tax returns, right? But what about business owners who file individual tax returns, as most self-employed businesses do? It turns out there are fewer tax perks for the self-employed business owner. For example, corporations are able to claim health insurance policies for employees as a business expense and their employees pay for those policies with pre-tax dollars.

5. Being self-employed is not a "real" job - Being your own boss means you have created a job for yourself and have prevented one more individual from showing up on the unemployment rolls. As the unemployment rate edged back up to 9 percent in April, more individuals may be considering creating a job for themselves. These jobs are just as valuable to the economy as an office or factory job. This dynamic business demographic contributes about $1 trillion to the economy every year -- no myth.

The link to the whole story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristie-arslan/five-big-myths-about-amer_b_866118.html

And these businesses are what Timothy Geithner and almost all of the Democratic Party leadership want to increase taxes upon. Keep one more little tidbit in mind. Except for a few exceptions, such as government owned electrical generation facilities, government does NOT MAKE a profit. Thus, in order to pay all the other government employees, governments must tax the businesses and workers in the private workforce. So, government is a leech sucking on the blood of the private industry and anyone advocating the creation of more government jobs is only making a bad system worse.

The Keynesian philosophy of economics where government is the best provider of economic growth is false. Sadly, our country is now experiencing horrific results of a failed system that has finally been implemented by the Democratic Party controlled Congress in league with a Socialist President in Barack Obama. However, I will venture to say that in the not too far future, there will be YET ANOTHER liberal who wants to claim that government “just didn’t spend enough” to be able to accomplish their goals.

So, to go out on a limb and answer the question in the title of this post, I will claim that those people are EVIL.