I know Trump has ben bashed for closing some of his businesses, but isn’t it a mark of a successful business person to know when to get out?
The Goverment never gets out of unsuccessful projects - they just keep funding them and swirling that money down a rat hole somewhere.
Remember the Spanish American War telephone tax? Only took 100 years to get that stopped.
There are 500 things like that.
Own a house? You take the home mortgage interest deduction? Well you must be an evil person because that money could buy hundreds of starving children in the inner cities tasty soy burgers. For most people, particularly in the early years of their mort, they couldn’t afford their mortgage payment without that deduction. But see, we have to have our heads so far up our ass to simultaneously want to follow and stay within the law as generally law abiding productive citizens even as we know, deep in our hearts, that we are starving young Black ghetto children looking to turn their lives around and overcoming the remnants of slavery we imposed on them, that’s you and I, by taking our freaking mortgage interest deduction.
Own a piece of rental property? You get depreciation on the building. No, correction, you HAVE TO take depreciation as a matter of tax law. Now we are talking very, very evil, because depr is an expense you take off the taxes you owe without even having spent any money to earn it! Oh that is so evil, it’s just like the depletion allowance for oil wells and we all know how freaking evil those oil companies are. You didn’t spend any money into the economy; yet here you are taking money off the amount of your taxes you have to send the IRS. It happens to be the law, you HAVE TO take it. You cannot [legally] decide to altruistically or out of guilt NOT take depr on real property held for rental.
See, the law only applies to those who know how make it seem like the government is the smartest guy in the room and always has your interests at heart. That would be whether you want to build a building or a business or both and maybe employ people; who would then pay taxes and spend their money and flush that into the economy. Oh, oh, oh, but you would of course be taking money away from all your customers, and that really sucks.
This all stems from the macro assumption that government knows better what to do with you and with your money and your life and how you should live it than you do. Not just rednecks clutching their guns and Bibles, it’s every single one of you. Every independent thought or idea you have, the government owns (”you didn’t build that”) and has a claim on the money you might or might not make from it.