Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Taxes

Jason sends along a cartoon that's both depressing and funny:

There's more than a bit of truth to this. President Obama insists he wants to create jobs, but nothing he's done so far has worked. The reason joblessness is still over 10% is that businesses won't hire when they fear their taxes, i.e. their costs, are going to go up in a few months. Yet the current Congress and administration seems unconcerned about this common sense impediment to job creation as they push legislation that will elevate taxes to levels that will be a disincentive for many businesses to increase their workforce.

If the President wishes to stimulate job creation, rather than throw money at programs that pay people to rake leaves, he should drop health care reform (at least in its current form) and cap and trade. If employers are confident that there won't be huge levies waiting for them down the road they'll be much more likely to hire workers today.

Unfortunately, the Democrats' solution to our economic woes has been to sink the nation further into debt, throw more money at pointless jobs, provide health care for those who don't have it, tax industry for using energy, and then raise taxes on everyone to try to pay for it all. The irony is that raising taxes simply means more people will be out of work and unable to afford health care so that more people will be dependent upon government to pay for their care, which means that taxes on everyone else will have to be raised even higher.

It doesn't make much sense.

RLC