Category: free trade & free markets

Categories
free trade & free markets tax policy

Tax-Free New York?

Where can you “start a tax-free business”?

New York State.

That’s what the Start-Up NY television campaign is telling folks — way down here in Virginia.

Recall that on Monday I bemoaned the “New York State Open for Business” TV ad campaign, which is spending $140 million to boast of numerous multi-million-dollar taxpayer subsidies to certain New York businesses, even while acknowledging a generally unfriendly overall business environment. (In fact, the Tax Foundation’s 2014 State Business Tax Climate Index ranks New York State worst in the nation, dead last.)

Now, Empire State government “has a new plan” — even newer than the “new New York” proclaimed by the previous PR effort. The newest Start-Up NY TV spot says unequivocally, “Dozens of tax-free zones all across the state. Move here, expand here or start a new business here and pay no taxes for ten years.”

Wow. No taxes. Sounds good.

But how will the state afford to deliver government services to these special tax-free businesses? Who will pay their share?

Of course, their employees will earn money and pay state income taxes. Oops. Actually, not so. The tax-freeness of this super-duper deal extends to the employees of these new or expanding operations, who can earn income free from state and local taxes.

So, the companies that have suffered long under the state’s onerous tax-and-regulation yoke, along with their heavily taxed employees, will continue to struggle — and even more so to pay for the new government-favored enterprises.

How fair!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Government Delivers Pizza

Pizza is popular. It hardly needs advertising, much less government subsidy.

And yet the federal government does, indeed, subsidize the promotion of pizza.

Apparently, our government wants us to eat more of the scrumptious (but fattening) stuff.

Has this has been cleared with Michelle Obama?Pie Chart

The program is the business of a much more power group, the USDA. In recent years, according to the U.S. Food Policy Blog,

USDA’s dairy checkoff program has spent many millions of dollars to increase pizza consumption among U.S. children and adults. Using the federal government’s taxation powers, the checkoff program collects a mandatory assessment of 15 cents on every hundredweight of milk that is sold for use as fluid milk or dairy products.

The goal is to promote cheese. (It promotes milk, too, but milk consumption is going down, steadily over the long term.) And, since the pizza industry is the biggest single user of cheese, those checkoff funds wind up in the advertising coffers of Domino’s Pizza, which soaks up about three-quarters of the dough. Ahem.

The federal government seems especially concerned to promote the eating of cheap delivery pizza.

But, good or bad, just talking about pizza makes me hungry for pizza. And yet, to prevent my corporeal presence from ballooning into a behemoth approximating the dimensions of the U.S. national debt, I don’t eat pizza very often.

In view of both of these truths, the USDA could afford to stop promoting the nominally Italian (but actually very American) foodstuff.

Get the government out of food advertising. Particularly (but not limited to) pizza.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*Pie chart not made from a pizza from Domino’s.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Obamacare Results Already In

A reader named Gert, commenting at National Review Online, repeats a notion heard often enough to become cliché.

Gert suggests that to debate Obamacare is “terribly premature. We just don’t have the data to know how it’s working yet.” Give it a chance to play out a bit more. Meantime, forget mere “anecdotes,” like those told by the millions who have lost their insurance despite the president’s repeated assurance that if they liked their coverage, they could keep it, “Period.”

Such advisors speak as if Obamacaresque interference in medicine were a species of interventionism utterly unlike anything before.Will and Ariel Durant's History of Western Civilization

But Obamacare is a type of thing; if we know that this type of thing is destructive by its nature, we can expect Obamacare to also be so. We know enough already — from history, economics, philosophy, psychology — to know that persons free to make their own judgments and act on them peacefully are better off than persons whose every move is mandated or banned.

What enables human beings to produce wealth, solutions, and alternatives in any realm is freedom. With responsibility. Freedom to act and to profit from our actions by choosing, as producers, what goods to provide others; by choosing, as consumers, the products that best suit our needs and circumstances. And to reap the rewards of success, and learn from our failures.

To continue to destroy this freedom in the name of collecting more data is wrong-headed. If the history of mankind so far doesn’t provide enough info to convince someone of the value of liberty, what will?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Startling Subsidy Success

“Moving on from unfulfilling jobs, thanks to health-care law,” was the gleeful headline* on the story spoon-fed to The Washington Post by Families USA, a pro-Obamacare group that maintains a “database of people who have benefitted” from the law (a pretty easy gig, no doubt).

Polly Lower quit her job and says, “It was wonderful.” She didn’t want the job anymore, because she went from “doing payroll, which she liked, to working on her boss’s schedule, which she loathed.”

Take this job and . . .

Eddie Gonzales-Novoa left a job making $88,000 annually, because he wanted to help a cancer-surviving relative start a website for others battling the disease. Now he makes very little, but has more rewarding employment.

Well, if they can afford not to work or to make less in order to do what they want, good for them!

But, if you pay taxes (anyone?), it might not be so good for you. Under the Affordable Care Act, both Eddie and Polly are getting their health insurance subsidized by the taxpayers.

Gonzalez-Novoa’s job change is easy to sympathize with, but why should “the taxpayers” pay for the bill? Might not they have similar dreams of their own to finance?

Lower not only didn’t like her job, she was better off without one — so she receives even more in Obamacare subsidies. She told the Washington Post that she has “adjusted well” to not working.

Sadly, the Post offered no report on how well the taxpayers are adjusting to continuing to work to pay these new subsidies to others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Print headline was different than online headline.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets ideological culture

The Visible Hand Drops the Ball

One of the great things about the Obamacare fiasco is that we get to revisit many of the left’s talking points for the last half-century and more — and hand the points right back, underlined.

How many times have we heard about market failure? A relentless litany.

Today’s topic? Government failure.

How many times have we been told that markets aren’t as important as we think, since what really matters is managerial know-how? The “visible hand” and all that. It was a book, if not a movie. And its basic message was that a few college-grad experts — highly trained technocrats, all — mattered more than competition. Government experts have the information. They have the skills. The techniques are known. Don’t give us any of that “free market” mumbo-jumbo, they say.

And yet, while the federal government’s efforts to build a usable healthcare.gov website proved feckless, lame and wildly expensive, Obamacare’s increasingly unbelievable proponents kept the patter going. Some states were doing just fine, they offered. Maryland, for instance.

Well, no.

The Old Line State has had just as much trouble in its new line of pushing online medical insurance policies as other governments. Biggest problem? You mean, other than not being able to put up a usable website on schedule? Or getting only four people signed up on launch day?

The Washington Post informs us that state officials ignored warnings that “no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan” for its scheduled launch.

The evidence is in. Want a new market “exchange”? Don’t turn to government.

Rely, instead, on folks competing in the real market.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Planners Cover Up Waste

You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.

But did you know they deliberately waste our time?

Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.

But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”

So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”

The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”

It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.