Freethinker is essentially correct. You cannot push a rope. Lower business taxes mean more money for investment, but more money for investment is not what is needed. In that sense, at this time, that tax rate is unrelated to jobs. My business is healthy on cash, and we've replaced the old machines with new. And we've spent over a million on process analysis/improvement. We are ready. But we're not going to start hiring (not counting replacements) until sales improve. Lower my taxes to zero, but sales are not going to improve as a result. Neither will I make unnecessary purchases (the other guys' sales). A couple of you speak as if you are essentially sole proprietors, and that's fine (enviable, even).
Does your company speak to aggregates? Suppose your customers supply widgets to start up companies which need to servers switches, chairs, desks tables, payroll software people, cars trucks phones and everything else. Do you think that if people with some cash liked the prospects for profit because taxes were lower they might start new businesses? Do you think a person is more likely to start a business and invest their time if there is a 70% tax on their the profits or if there is a 12 percent tax on the profits they make. come on this very basic econ and very basic human nature. I serious doubt your entire industry is price inelastic. My final point.... Would you continue to work if you had to pay 110 percent of your revenue in taxes. Please do not try and say you business and the businesses around you are not sensitive to taxes. That is just socialist talk, At some point when inputs are too high businesses shut down. Taxes are inputs. At some point when too much of profits are taxes away, people stop working. Those are fundamental to basic economic understanding. No amount of socialist talk can change those truths.
You keep talking about crushing business taxes, or "what if" taxes were so high scenarios, and yes, I do agree that they could be too high for business to be profitable. But like I said, "at this time", looking from Edmonton to Houston, they are not too high. B2B is doing a bit of farting around, trading widgets as you said, but essentially they're waiting on the consumer, 70% of economic activity, to start buying. As for the consumer, if it was not dramatic tax increases that pitched millions of them out of work in the past two years, do you really think a dramatic reduction in taxes is going to bring them back?
I was talking to my trading buddy the other day, listening to him complaining about his IRS audit, which, btw, went fine, np, paid an extra $21 because of an unclear business receipt, and that was it. But, his words are still haunting me, perhaps because our experiences are quite similar. IRS' main complaint was that although his "topline revenue" ie, all stocks bought added together across 5 accounts spread across 3 brokerages, was close to $1B, he was justifying only $830M - some initial (stock purchasing) costs hadn't made it to his 2007 tax return and the sale price was seen as the total profit. So, my friend had to dig a bit deeper into his TS account to get the missing data, which he did. Meanwhile, the IRS lady went over his business expenses and found a small one that was lacking proper receipt; and that ended the audit, np. Just think about it: almost $1B in topline revenues (day/swing trading stocks) resulting in a respectable low-mid six figure net profit, and not a single employee in sight other than my friend and his wife who handles "the office" in their basement and communications with brokers, information sellers etc. It used to take factories and thousands of workers to get that kind of business working, right? And then you had unions and affirmative action and complaints galore from everyone. After all, my friend is a white male who makes more than what Obama feels is appropriate... ie, in the eyes of many he's the scum of the earth. Why would he even think of branching out in a larger sense, hire people to grow his business in a more traditional way? He's happy with what he makes and he thinks that he has a chance to get to double his current income with no extra help, just work smarter and with better technology, ie trading robots as they mature and become more reliable. Which brings me to my point: You cannot enslave the human spirit. You call the most creative and productive among us all sorts of names, you tax them to death, and they find a way to escape, make a good living without playing your game. Who gets hurt in the process? Young people who just want a job, and all those multitudes who just want to be taken care of, that's who. What's more, what keeps my friend from moving to a business-friendlier and lower tax climate, like the Caribbean or Switzerland, and doing the same job from there (like all those big businesses move their factories to low-labor-cost China)? His two kids are in college, he says... after they graduate he'll think about it. After all, to paraphrase that gangster at the meeting in Godfather, my friend is not a Socialist.
Once upon a time there was a white girl, we'll call her America. She had grown weary of the same old dating scene and decided to date a black guy. It would be fun and the world would see she wasn't a racist. It was a steamy love affair in the beginning and all was right in the world. But now a couple years have passed and she has come to find he's maxed out all her credit cards, is screwing her sister, and is strongly suggesting she sell her ass on the street to finance his drug habit. Now even her most liberal friends call her a fool for staying with such a dirt bag. She is learning a hard lesson that making change for the sake of change ain't all that smart.
Her previous boyfriend was much worse.So was the 72 year old senile guy who tried to court her before choosing her current boyfriend