I agree there is room in economic debate for different values. I believe Pat Buchanan of all people made the point that there is more to a healthy society than GDP growth. I actually agree with that sentiment. I'm not at all sure it is a good idea to export all manufacturing to China or all software engineering to India. Or allow companies to displace skilled American workers with low paid immigrants. But there are costs to any decision. If we willingly choose a course of action that will negatively affect the economy, we should at least acknowledge that we are doing so and have a good reason for it. Too much tax policy is decided on the basis of looking at who benefits and who doesn't, rather than on the basis of what the effect is on the economy. I think that was the genius of the supply side argument.
Europe + US + Japan are in a zero state growth because all growths come from financial "investment" not from production one and this can be seen looking at the structure of benefits from big firms. These firms are now international although some have their head either in each continent, they are not linked with a nation but with profits. The first to do it were bankers. The so called petro-dollars come from that phenomenon. So profits will be made where it can be made at the highest and production will be made where it can be made at the lowest. China is favored as the next super opportunity and big businessmen from the 3 continents are willing to pact with China although it is not a democracy. Also after competition on INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS competition will now come to SERVICES for example software engineering. SERVICES used to be the backbone of growth for our society now you can ask an EXPERIMENTED indian engineer which will cost 5 to 10 times less than A NOVICE french engineer in France. So you see the problem at term. They pretext competitions whereas it is just a pretext to create inequalities between all continents because for dozens of years they tell us about equalizing third world with our world the gap has gone wider and wider and IMF and World bank are now accused by Indonesians as criminals against humanity that kill more people than the nazis. That it is true or not without any proof their perception is significant about what is going on. They have interest to create this gap because the people in both developped countries and under-developped countries will have to accept lower and lower conditions of salary and others. They talk about globalisation instead of cooperation and I promise you that I will even show you with irrefutable today's proof that what they want is no more or less than what Maltus preconised two hundred years ago. It is very hard to believe without proofs but what I have is so explicit and the person who plays a major role in globalisation has written it in a book so that it will be undisputable.
What hogwash Henry. Even Saddam, had the good sense of putting most of his faith in US currency. Out of the approx. $ 900 M found sofar only 100 M was in Euro's with the balance in US dollars. freealways
readme The Fabulist Bush's absurd obsession with small business. By Michael Kinsley Posted Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 1:21 PM PT President Bush, of course, is not a junior reporter for the New York Times. So maybe it doesn't matter if he makes up stories and puts them in the newspaper. After Ronald Reagan, it's almost a presidential tradition. Bush was in New Mexico on Monday with a new answer to critics who complain that his tax cut proposal favors the rich. In two words: small business. "Most new jobs in America are created by small businesses." Therefore tax cuts "must focus on the entrepreneur." And thence to more familiar bromides: It's not "the government's money," it's "your money"; "our greatest strength" is "our individual citizens"; criticism is "just typical Washington, D.C., political rhetoric, is what it is." The myth of small business is one of the more ridiculous bipartisan superstitions that influence government policy. Small businesses, by their nature, come and go. They create more jobs than big businesses and wipe out more jobs, too. Any small-business owner burdened by high taxes is, by definition, more affluent than the typical big-business owner, who is an ordinary working American with an interest in a retirement fund. Small businesses are swell. But special favors for small business make no sense in terms of either fairness or prosperity. Bush gave his speech Monday at a company in Albuquerque called MCT Industries. "We're standing in the midst of what we call the American dream," he said. MCT is privately owned by the family of Ted Martinez, who founded it on a shoestring in 1973 and is now a wealthy VIP who hangs around with politicians. "The Martinez family is living that dream," Bush said. Before we even get to the fantasy element, there is a logical problem here, isn't there? A successful "small" business makes an odd poster child for the proposition that the government is getting in the way of small business success. How did the Martinez family manage to achieve the American dream during a period when high taxes were supposedly thwarting that dream? If MCT Industries is so successful under current arrangements, why does it need a tax cut? You don't need overdeveloped smell detectors to suspect that this story may be a bit more complicated. And the most casual stroll through the Internet and media databases enriches the narrative a lot. MCT Industries seems to be a weird collection of unrelated businesses whose only unifying theme is selling to government agencies or needing the approval of politicians. The Martinez family is wealthy because of tax revenues, not despite them. No surprise, MCT is a member of the Rio Grande Minority Purchasing Council, a trade association for businesses looking to benefit from reverse discrimination. Racial favoritism for "disadvantaged" wealthy business owners is the most ridiculous and unjustifiable form of affirmative action and generally the only kind Republicans are enthusiastic about. Martinez is a GOP activist, but his company does not discriminate. At a 1997 conference of Hispanic CEOs, Clinton Energy Secretary Federico Pena boasted about how "MCT was able to secure a diesel-powered aircraft maintenance contract with the U.S. Air Force" thanks to the "assistance" of a federal agency. Earlier this year, the Albuquerque City Council declined to authorize about $5 million of industrial revenue bonds for MCT. IRBs are a racketâlegal, unfortunatelyâin which local governments use their right to issue federal-tax-exempt bonds in order to raise money for private companies. The company gets to borrow at a below-market interest rate, subsidized by the loss to the federal Treasury. In Albuquerque, the lucky companies get exempted from local property taxes and some state taxes to boot. MCT did not want the money for job-creating expansion but to refinance IRBs it already enjoys to get an even lower interest rate. Those IRBs helped to finance a factory to build maintenance equipment and do R & D, both for the Defense Department. October 2002. MCT is one of the contributors to a PAC that paid for the mayor's family to visit China. July 2002. The Bureau of Indian Affairs approves an MCT municipal garbage landfill on an Indian reservation. Also, the New Mexico Rural Development Response Council and several state agencies help MCT to acquire land for a factory to build platforms for aircraft repairs. August 1999. Waste News reports that Albuquerque has a bizarre regulation requiring all city garbage trucks to be made out of a particular brand of steel. Only one company sells trucks made out of this material. Guess. December 1998. The Energy Department (secretary: Bill Richardson, now governor of New Mexico) hires MCT to build magnets to be used in making tritium for nuclear warheads. June 1997. MCT, as a local company, competes against a national waste-management firm for a local garbage-collection contract. It wins the contract and sells the business to the national firm the next day. October 1996. Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp holds a rally at MCT. Ted Martinez hands him a document asserting that almost a third of MCT's payroll goes to paying federal, state, and local taxes. In his speech, Kemp makes it "half." October 1995. Giant defense contractor TRW announces that it has won a $185 million contract from the Air Force, which it will share with two "small disadvantaged business" including MCT. December 1994. In congressional testimony about export assistance for small businesses, a Commerce Department official talks about how the federal government sponsored an exhibit by MCT at the Paris Air Show and subsequent Commerce Department shows in China and Dubai. So you get rich with a dozen different types of tax-funded help, you become a Republican, and you live happily ever after complaining about how much you pay in taxes. Maybe President Bush was right after all, that is the American dream. Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2082986/
Typical Michael Kinsley column. Snide, sarcastic and totally devoid of anything useful. At least we now know of one government program he disapproves of--one that goes to republicans. You can almost hear him muttering how damn ungrateful these Mexicans were since everyone knows minorities are supposed to be democrats. Personally, I would be all in favor of ending these favoritism programs. They are ridiculous. You couldn't get one democrat to go along with that however, and they would accuse you of being in the KKK. For all his blathering Kinsley didn't deal with the substance of the Presidnet's remarks. Most jobs are created bysmall business. Big business has suffered a net loss of jobs, and small business has addded jobs, despite his suggestion the other way. Soak the rich tax policies tend to hurt small businessmen. What's so terrible about someone building up a small business and passing it on to their kids?
The article is replete with specific facts and refutes the Bush plan directly and specifically. Of particular note is the dissection of Bush's constant and insipid mythologizing small business as the great benefactors of our economy - and the direct beneficiaries of the administrations tax cut plan. It's clear you simply can't see through your own bias to recognize simple truth. And I notice how you label Kinsley a racist, while ignoring the fact he presents - nice touch. Bill O'reilly would be proud.
I don't think the facts were ignored. They were rejected because they contradicts the facts AAA has seen. If someone would do some homework, and post some real numbers then we could identify who is telling the truth about small business, instead of sitting here yelling at one another, and accusing each other of ignoring facts. Either small business is spawning a lot of new jobs, more so than big business which has obviously been downsizing, or its not. peace axeman
A quote from the SBA annual report for 2001 the latest I could find. Small biz does it when comes to job growth. "Small firms represent about 99 percent of employers, employ about half of the private sector workforce, and are responsible for about two-thirds of the net new jobs. While small firms contribute substantially to the growth of the economy, the number of small firms does not change dramatically over time." DS
Welp, looks like Kinsley is full of it, huh? These guys like to point at the small biz's that "made it" while existing in a state of high taxation, and then using this as an excuse NOT to cut taxes. Fallacious reasoning. It doesn't occur to them that things could have been much better with lower taxes. This is the equivalent to saying it's ok to torture people as long as you dont actually kill them. peace axeman
99 percent of employers is a highly misleading statistic - it's like saying that 99 percent of all taxpayers are individuals - it means almost nothing. "responsible for 2/3'rds of net new jobs is also misleading - especially when we haven't seen a net increase in new jobs for 2 years now. Ask the SBA what percentage of small businesses are responsible for net jobs lost? Or as a ratio to large corporations? Small business fail as quickly as they are spawned - that's the fact. It's not a strike against entrepreneurial endeavor - merely the other side to the seemingly disproportionate positive contribution they make to the overall employment picture. And, of course small businesses contribute "substantially" (a vague term - but ok) to the economy. Organized crime contributes "substantially" to the economy too. But what does it mean? The point is that the Bush tax plan has almost no content to spur real economic growth at the small-business level- what it has is massive windfall benefits for those in the very top tax bracket. Clearly Bush can't go on the road promoting his reverse Robin Hood agenda - so what does he do? He seizes upon the convenient fact that small business are often structured so that they actually pay taxes on their income as individuals (sub-S corps, Ltd's, etc..). This allows Bush to fallaciously argue that the tax cuts for the rich help the little guy. The fact as Kinsley points out is that small business thrives in all tax climates and always has. Furthermore the structure of government-subsidized small business entitlement programs already offers massive opportunity to benefit entrepreneurs without cutting federal income taxes to the richest .01% of individuals. If Bush were serious about creating jobs and helping small business he would expand payroll tax cuts and offer far more tax credits to small employers to reinvest in capital equipment and expanded payrolls - Instead we get dividend tax breaks (how many mom & pops pay dividends??) and huge cuts at the top tax bracket. What Bush has done - and many seem all to ready to buy into - is mask a huge windfall to the rich - in the garb of help for the little guy. Unless you are filthy rich (God bless you if you are) you should be outraged at this deceit. Bush is doing nothing more than exploiting the misery of millions of Americans for the benefit of the very few rich. This is no different than Ken Lay preaching to thousands of ordinary Enon workers that they would reap great financial benefits buying into Enron stock, as the top brass cashed out. Think a little deeper people. Please.