(11-04-2020 11:38 AM)mrbig Wrote: Any chance all y'all can move the tax policy fight to a new (or just a different) thread and keep this one more focused on the election results?
Your wish is my command, MrBig, because I really want to ask some questions about this particular subject.
One, the democrat proposal to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% will result in a rate of 33-34% when state taxes are added. The average corporate rate for the OECD (advanced) countries is currently around 24%, per
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=78166, and we would again have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. How do you expect corporations to react? My guess is that we will see a fairly massive wave of offshoring. How would you propose to prevent that? My guess would also be that going forward, the future incentive to invest in the USA will be drastically reduced. How would you propose to avoid that, or to grow the economy without investment?
I've called this policy socialist, and been told that socialism means government ownership of the means of production, and that nobody is proposing that. But if there is no private investment in the means of production, that will kind of necessarily fall on government.
Two, the proposed increase in individual income taxes will again put us near the top of OECD countries, per
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I7. Again, how would you expect high income/wealth individuals to react? Unlike wage earners, they can pretty much move their income to whatever country they want, and pay taxes there. So how do you prevent a massive outflow of individual investment? Or, alternatively, how do you avoid harming the economy severely by loss of investment?
Three, not really a tax policy, but as I understand the energy policy, the goal is to eliminate fossil fuels within a fixed time frame. That's fine, as long as there is a viable alternative available then. But what if there isn't? What then? Doesn't it make more sense to approach it from the supply side, and take all reasonable actions to develop alternatives ASAP, and to switch use as the economics work? As an example, Texas on a windy day gets 1/3 of its electricity from wind. This is not because of any arbitrary fiat, but rathe because there's a lot of wind in West Texas and that makes wind power economically competitive. Isn't that a better model? And isn't it a better idea to be doing all we can with existing technology, rather than issuing some fiat that mandates change at a fixed future date, even if that change ends up being changing from something to nothing?
I see the democrat policies as a certain prescription for destruction of the USA economy. We shouldn't truly be Venezuela, because our expanse of productive farmland should be sufficient to prevent starvation. But if we don't have a viable energy source, we could lose even that.
