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Geithner: A new tax on jobs? AP View Enlarged Image
Fiscal Policy: Timothy Geithner thinks tax hikes will help the economy dig its way out of the hole. Can we really afford two more years of this kind of thinking?
Appearing Sunday on ABC News' "This Week," the secretary of the treasury said he had no problem with letting tax cuts expire for wealthy Americans. "It's responsible to let the tax cuts expire that just go to 2% to 3% of Americans, the highest-earning Americans."
Responsible? Quite the contrary. Indeed, letting taxes rise on the most productive Americans is the most irresponsible thing our government could be doing right now. By dooming us to a permanently lower rate of economic growth, it will kill literally millions of future jobs and trillions of dollars in future GDP.
The top 5% who will be targeted for tax hikes by the Obama administration at year-end are the nation's premier small business creators and entrepreneurs. The tax hike against the "rich" is in fact a tax hike on small businesses. The dirty secret is that small businesses usually don't pay taxes, unlike corporations. The owners do.
Under the current plans of Geithner, President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to let portions of the Bush tax hikes expire, the two top tax rates are expected to rise in January to 36% from 33%, and to 39.6% from 35%.
These are not small increases for families earning more than $200,000 a year — the very people who have started or who are most likely to start new businesses. As Americans for Tax Reform has noted, "A majority of small business profits will face a tax rate hike under the Obama-Pelosi-Reid plan."
This is significant because young, small businesses are the economy's biggest job creators. A Kauffman Foundation study conducted last year discovered that firms less than five years old created all the net new jobs in America. Not some of them, all of them.
The new taxes on "families" will poison small business formation and growth. As NewGeography.com executive director Joel Kotkin recently noted, "Family companies represent 60% of the nation's employment and almost 80% of all new jobs."
Small, family-owned businesses will also take hits from the return of the estate tax and the small-business-unfriendly financial "reform" bill that the president just signed. Then there's the government's overhaul of health care, which slaps new fees, taxes and regulations. In short, if you were trying to destroy a vibrant, entrepreneurial economy you couldn't come up with a better plan.
Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time — and with the ...
The news in that massive data dump provided by the dauntingly mysterious Wikileaks (who? what?) to one American and two European publications is that there is no news at all. We already knew that the war in Afghanistan was not going well. We already knew — or, in the words of the New York ...
Energy Policy: Senate Democrats have shelved job-killing cap-and-trade legislation, at least for now. Neither the political nor the Earth's climate suggests it's a good time to try to fool Mother Nature or the American people. After a Thursday meeting with Senate Democrats, Senate Majority ...
Leaks: Secrecy is an indispensable weapon with which free countries defend themselves. In making tens of thousands of Afghan war documents public, a Swedish Web site has cyberattacked the U.S. and the Free World. WikiLeaks, which is sending the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan into convulsions ...
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Posted By: OBSERVER U.K(845) on 7/27/2010 | 2:43 AM ET
It is the SOCIALIST only way of thinking, TAX! TAX! TAX! it has to do good ?? "GOD HELP AMERICA"
Posted By: dwdrury(2015) on 7/26/2010 | 11:40 PM ET
Strole said it, below. But what most Dim-o-crats these days fail to see is they're doing static analyses of a dynamic system. In aircraft design, that's the surest way to guarantee the wings will fall off and the craft will plummet to earth, leaving a big, smoking hole in the ground. Hmmm. Same can be said for the economy.
Posted By: noteasilyfooled(90) on 7/26/2010 | 11:06 PM ET
Relax, stop hoarding money. Pay the damn taxes. Uncle Sam will own it all. It is just a matter of time. In the meantime, you just borrow what you have. You are responsible to keep it safe and make it grow. When you drop dead, your pass the responsability to your heirs. It may take a few generations but at the end Uncle Sam will own it all. Every Dollar, every piece of property, all that is precious, stocks, bonds,....... It wil be Uncle Sams. You are just a cheap labor. So go and ENJOY.
Posted By: The Barnicle(260) on 7/26/2010 | 10:54 PM ET
I HAVE NEVER HEARD A COMMENT THAT COMES CLOSE TO EXPRESSING THE RESENTMENT I FEEL FOR libs THAT THINK THAT THEY ARE THE "ones" TO DECIDE WHO SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO ENJOY THE FRUITS OF THEIR OWN LABOR.
Posted By: Judith from Michigan(2180) on 7/26/2010 | 9:54 PM ET
Mr O is anti-capitalist. His entire admin is filled with anti-capitalists. Their policies are achieving exactly what they intend. Down with free market enterprise/capitalism, up with state-run/Socialism. So what else is new? And it is a guarantee that if they let the tax cuts expire on 12-31-10, their new gusher of money they are expecting will go to new entitlement spending (aka vote buying) & not deficit reduction.
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