{"id":7004,"date":"2012-02-29T00:21:31","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T00:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=7004"},"modified":"2012-02-29T00:21:31","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T00:21:31","slug":"democrats-taxes-dont-hurt-growth-except-when-i-say-they-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/democrats-taxes-dont-hurt-growth-except-when-i-say-they-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Democrats: Taxes don&#8217;t hurt growth, except when I say they do"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New York governor Andrew Cuomo is <a href=\"http:\/\/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/02\/24\/another-yogurt-factory-is-set-to-open-upstate\/?scp=1&amp;sq=yogurt%20factories%20cuomo&amp;st=cse\">giving $26 million in tax breaks <\/a>to PepsiCo and a German dairy company in reward for their promise to open a joint yogurt factory in the western part of New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The utter injustice of such tax concessions to companies large enough to extort them is of course patent.\u00a0 While the big guys get the breaks\u2014and for not that much in return: it is estimated that the new yogurt plant will bring in a mere 186 jobs\u2014small businesses, who can least afford it, have to continue to pay exorbitant tax rates.\u00a0 Pepsi probably shells out several million a year on diversity training and diversity PR alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But what is equally galling about corporate welfare is that the Democratic politicians who dole it out (no less enthusiastically than Republicans) never recognize the obvious principle behind their actions: that high taxes hurt growth.\u00a0 If lowered taxes are a boon to PepsiCo and its German yogurt partner Theo M\u00fcller (or to \u201cgreen\u201d energy companies in the Obama-Jerry Brown portfolio of uncompetitive energy enterprises), why wouldn\u2019t they be a boon to every other company in New York state?\u00a0 Yet flush after signing a deal to exempt a favored company or industry from punishing taxes, these same politicians almost invariably turn around and keep taxes high or raise them on everyone else, on the ground that tax rates don&#8217;t matter.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans have their own variety of hypocrisy.\u00a0 While rightly objecting to tax breaks for green energy, they fight strenuously to preserve them for conventional energy companies (or even for the ethanol boondoggle), on the specious ground that getting rid of a selective tax exemption constitutes a \u201ctax increase\u201d in violation of the Grover Norquist no new taxes pledge.\u00a0 The Republicans\u2019 opposition to get rid of existing corporate welfare simply plays into the Democratic playbook that Republicans are shills for the rich and powerful.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New York governor Andrew Cuomo is giving $26 million in tax breaks to PepsiCo and a German dairy company in reward for their promise to open a joint yogurt factory in the western part of New York.\u00a0 The utter injustice &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/democrats-taxes-dont-hurt-growth-except-when-i-say-they-do\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7004"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7004"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7007,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7004\/revisions\/7007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}