News Flash: Bono Is a Republican

Or at least he would be if he were an American citizen, and who'd have thought it? The U2 lead singer believes lower tax rates actually bring in more revenue and create greater prosperity for everyone. This is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a hundred years. Maybe now young people who are often swayed by the opinions expressed by their pop culture icons will at least have a little doubt about the liberal progressive claim that the road to economic prosperity is to soak the rich, especially corporations. One can hope.

Anyway, here's the smoking gun:

The U2 frontman said he believes large companies that avoid paying billions in taxes bring prosperity, rather than harm the economic growth of the country.

“We are a tiny little country, we don’t have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known,” he told the Observer.

“We don’t have natural resources, we have to be able to attract people.”

Because of its generous tax allowances, he added, Ireland has reaped the benefits of “more hospitals and firemen and teachers because of [the tax] policies”.

If all these things are true of a small country with few resources they're no less true of any other country. For some unfathomable reason, however, we keep electing people who think that the way to finance the welfare state is to smother the most productive engines of our economy in taxes and regulations.

What too many of us fail to consider is that the lower the corporate tax rates in a country (The U.S. has the highest in the world) the more attractive that country is to business, the more businesses that plant themselves in a nation the more jobs they create for the people, the more jobs that are created the more money people have to spend on their families and the more taxes they pay, the results of which are a higher living standard for the people and more revenue for the government.

Even so, the idea of lowering corporate tax rates is anathema to Democrats, not because they can't see the force of the argument, many do, but because they can't bear the thought that the people at the top will be getting even richer than they are. What seems to drive tax policy on the left is a desire not to raise more revenue, but rather to reduce income inequality between rich and poor. Rather than raise the poor up by creating jobs, they prefer to close the income gap but bringing the rich down.

Maybe this makes sense to somebody, but I just don't see it.