and , of slavery, uh I mean taxation...........look what it did to my once great city New York (and no I am not talking about 9/11) I am talking about a welfare state........
A big chunk of what has passed for private-sector job growth in New York has also occurred in industries that are nominally private but are actually supported by tax revenues and therefore don’t create wealth but at best merely redistribute it. These industries—health care and social services—have accounted for nearly half the city’s job growth in the past 12 months and now represent 18 percent of all “private”-sector jobs in the city. Moreover, concentrated in areas like nonprofit social-services agencies, home health-care services, and nursing homes, these are mostly low-wage jobs. The typical home health-care job in the city, for instance, pays about $25,000 a year. New York will never earn back its title as one of the country’s leading entrepreneurial centers when tax-supported low-wage jobs account for so much of its economic growth.
Anyone who has watched the long decline of New York’s economy—which today employs nearly 200,000 fewer people than 35 years ago—will understand what’s happening, because it has happened before, repeatedly. The city’s economic slide began in the mid-1960s, when city and state pols began sharply raising taxes to pay for an expanded social agenda—saddling New York with the heaviest tax burden among U.S. cities. Today, Gotham taxes residents and businesses at about 75 percent more than the average of the next ten largest American cities—and that startling percentage is growing. Over the past 35 years, those high taxes have sucked billions out of the private sector, depriving it of needed capital for expansion and ultimately driving away thousands of businesses, including around a hundred Fortune 500 firms, and leaving fewer quality jobs for New Yorkers. A 1997 City Journal study concluded that if New York’s taxes had been in line with those of other old industrial cities, Gotham would have 1 million more jobs than it actually has.
The city’s Giuliani-era economic revival should have provided a blueprint for how to address Gotham’s post-9/11 challenges, for the 1990s was the one period in the
last 35 years when the city’s economy outperformed the nation’s, growing by 440,000 jobs and bringing New York back to its 1969 job peak shortly before the terrorists struck. Faced with budget deficits when he took office in 1993, Mayor Giuliani refused to raise taxes but instead shrank the size of government and slowly began cutting taxes. When Wall Street boomed and poured tax dollars into the city’s coffers, Giuliani used the resultant budget surpluses to cut taxes further, reducing the overall tax rate by about 10 percent, still much higher than most major cities. Even so, the cuts sent a message that New York no longer viewed the business community as a gigantic revenue source to be shaken down at every opportunity. Spurred by Giuliani, New York went ten years without a tax increase, although rising profits and property values propelled by economic revival still boosted tax collections and helped fill the city’s coffers.
Read it all, it's the only lesson in capitalism vs socialism you will ever need.
As SNYC, Hawk so succinctly put it
Bleak indeed. Doesn't help the situation when non-profit organizations designed to assist poor children and elderly, steal from those non-profit/non-taxed coffers to fill the coffers of the very people who have the radio air power to influence voters into believing that rich people are evil(especially Repugs), or school principles who encourage parents to lie about their income in order to garner receive additional milk-money funds. I have no doubt that these are just a few examples in the vast wasteland of corruption called Socialism.
The tragedy is that NYer's will look upon Clinton as being the one who brought about NYC's economic expansion during the 1990's rather than giving credit to Guiliani's 'low taxation' influence.
Why is it so difficult to comprehend the simple fact that taxing people to death causes poverty?
Why indeed - Atlas?
UPDATE Sept 9th - Received this email and had to share it with you;
Your blog had a topic near and dear to my heart...taxation. You know what I want to see? A top federal tax rate of no more than 33% and permanent repeal of the Estate and Gift (AKA Death) Tax. When I was doing my graduate law studies, my professors stated a rule of thumb that tax revenues go DOWN if the top rate is above 33%. My profs loved it when the 1986 tax reform act lowered the top rate to 28%. With a 28% fed rate, and if states could limit themselves to 5%, tax rates would be low enough that it would not make sense for the wealthy to engage in aggressive tax avoidance planning.
Ohio is not in NY's league, but our top tax rate is just above 7.5%; and when you factor in the CITY income taxes (which can be as high as 2.5%) you have a top rateof 9.5% to 10%. The nearest top rate in the surrounding states is 5% in Kentucky. Pennsylvania has a top rate of 3.2% (and I think it is going down to 2.8%). To make matters worse, Ohio is NOT a high service state...this money is wasted on a bloated bureaucracy and riduculous capital expenditures. I am working in a 40 floor high rise that is practically empty...4,000 employees in this building...less than 100 per floor! And this building is enormous! Where are all the other employees who use to work here? Well many of them are in two additional 30+ floor buildings that the state built in the last 15 years. Not to mention the
$100 million spent to refurbish a 10 floor building for exclusive use by the Ohio Supreme Court. I swear, I want to find the grave of Democrat House Speaker Vern Riffe and take a CRAP on it!!!!! He pushed through all this spending/waste! I think his grave deserves some waste of its own!I had a cousin who was earning 6 figures of income in Atlanta at the time. He asked me what he should do. I told him to pull all his money out of deferred comp plans (paying the 10% penalty) and take as much income as he could in the years when the rate was 28%. I told him he would never see rates that low again. Better to have the money free and clear of any restrictions than stuck under heavy restrictions imposed by a tax avoidance plan.
The estate and gift tax is a trap for the unwary. The mega wealthy have a variety of ways of avoiding the tax (just look at the Kennedys and Teresa Heinz)(or better yet, DON'T look at them...disgusting creatures). Congress generally designs tax laws so that the tax avoidance techniques currently used by members of congress and their friends continue to be permitted. Did you ever wonder why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation opposes repeal of the Death Tax? Well, it is probably because the Gates have spent a small fortune creating a tax avoidance plan to keep their millions (I think that these Gates are the parents of Microsoft's Bill Gates) from getting hit by that tax...money that will have been wasted if the Death Tax is repealed.
The sock-the-rich nonsense espoused by liberals is just that...nonsense. What you really have is a tax system that does its best to keep NEW people
from becoming rich...the old money is exempt..
hat tip; HUGH G
