My dad was a plank owner in Citizens for Limited Taxation way back in the Seventies, something I am quite proud of, because that says a lot about my dad. He had been somewhat vilified on his school board and Selectman seat in town politics since he was a conservative, and specifically a fiscal conservative. Leftists hate it when someone who they expect to rubber stamp their spending actually digs in their heels on principle, not on the expectation of some corollary benefit, political or budgetary.
I cannot comment on the pointed impact of Proposition 2 1/2 on my taxes except to say I feel in my gut that if Proposition 2 1/2 weren’t there, we would be worse off from a tax perspective than we are now.
Proposition 2 1/2 has been the ONLY thing in my entire adult life (that I can recall) that has even ostensibly had the welfare of the taxpayer in mind in this state. But even saying that, they did what Leftist politicians do-they simply find ways around it, and never get called out on it. They take money from this fund or that which may be exempt in some way, the way a company may budget something out of operational funds versus a capital request, so the funds don’t have to travel the bumpy road of getting a capital request for money approved.
All that said, I freely admit this-I am conflicted in efforts by the state to attract business. On one hand, I am for the efforts of a state to attract business by manipulating tax agreements in some way to get a specific company to locate in the state and provide jobs.
On the other hand, why not make the overall tax environment favorable to all employers and companies including ones that didn’t get a special deal to move there?
The chapter discusses the history. How Bill Weld got involved and it rippled to support Fidelity Investments.
I believe the principle should be to NOT favor any particular industry or company except in rare cases -- and in minor investments. And the reason is you are tampering with the free enterprise system with its built in checks and balances.
Everybody in business needs to have SKIN in the GAME. The rewards should go to those who take the risk themselves. And you must also pay the penalty of failure. "That's the breaks of Naval Air" as the airdales used to say.
Trump was right when he said: if you ship jobs overseas, then you will pay a tax penalty if you try to bring those goods or services back to the U.S. It's a similar proposition to this and it's where Bernie intersects with Trump.
Elizabeth Warren is actually right when she says the public helped rich people succeed because the public built the roads and infrastructure.
There's a moral responsibility for a company to pay its fair share of taxes. Home owners, plus small and medium sized businesses do, so why should large corporations be exempt or pay a smaller share. Amazon and Walmart are killing small shop-owners and they are getting the biggest tax breaks.
* * * * * *
Now one of the next steps, I think, is to explain the the key principles in some visual form -- something that's easy to read.
It's one thing for a FReeper to understand this stuff. But what about your average Joe Six-Pack and Jill Wine-Cooler? They are not political junkies and never will be.
H. L. Mencken discusses this huge problem of a republic in a Chicago Sunday Tribune article in September 1926:
Are they interested only in crime? I don't think so. What they are interested in is drama. The thing presented to them must take the form of combat, and it must be a very simple combat, with one side clearly right and the other clearly wrong . They can no more imagine neutrality than they can imagine the fourth dimension. And when they see drama, they want to see it moving.
... The journalism of the future, that is, the mob journalism -- will move in the direction that I have indicated.
Now at the time, Mencken was talking about the value of tabloid magazines such as today's New York Post.
But the tabloid of today is clearly Facebook. That was created for the masses. So now, with Twitter being acquired by somebody who believes in free speech, perhaps the next opportunity for Twitter is to expand free speech content into electronic tabloid space like Facebook has done.
Agreed, so long as there are politicians and commercial money involved in a public proposition there is room for concern.
IMO, no such proposition should reach the formal stage until an apolitical group of experts, economists, etc. demonstrate a financial gain for the taxpayers.
The Film Act discussed in this thread clearly appears at midpoint of its life to date to have been just the opposite.