Last week, Forbes on Fox discussed a letter sent by a group of CEO’s to the White House expressing concern about raising taxes. In case you didn’t know how to interpret that, host David Asman explained it with a “fair and balanced” Fox News Alert that began, “Hike taxes on investors and kiss a jobs recovery goodbye.”
Rich Karlgaard led off the discussion, saying, “The first thing that would happen is that it would kill the stock market… As companies saw their stock valuations go down, it became even more aggressive about trimming payroll.”
Asman commented, “Rick Ungar, if you want less of something, you tax it more. …Might mean less of a boom on the stock market.”
Ungar, the only person out of six panelists to support a tax hike said, “When taxes are higher on dividends what happens? People don’t want to receive dividends because they don’t want to pay the higher taxes…. Companies see that money… they reinvest it in their businesses… They do that so they can grow the business and in fact increase the share value. When they grow the business what happens? They have to hire more people.”
Asman could be heard saying skeptically, “Oh reallllllyyyyy.”
Steve Forbes said, “What Rick described should get him a good job at a university with that kind of nonsense, he should get a job with the French government, they’re about to do this kind of crazy stuff. (everybody laughed heartily and Asman joked, “Sacre bleu!”)… We tried this nonsense in the 1930’s, it failed. Japan’s been trying this since the 1990’s, with a disastrous result for the economy. We’ve been doing it for the last 3 years, hello?”
Elizabeth MacDonald suggested more taxes would just be wasted: “The tedious orgy of self-righteousness continues in Washington D.C. …These politicians …wouldn’t know a responsible budget if it ran over them on K Street and backed up over them again. …Capital gains revenue comes in more when you cut it. We saw that in 1997 and in 2003. In ‘97 it went up 28%, in 2003 it went up 21%. …Apple, Google, Facebook, Paypal, all angel investors, all capital gains money coming in to fund those companies which create even more tax revenues for the government.”
Asman threw in the obligatory swipe at the left. “This is just put forth by people who want to bring down the income of the richest in the country, without care for what happens to the overall economy.”
Victoria Barrett brought it back to harming the economy: “They (people) will invest differently. Dividend stocks will go down, the whole stock market will take a hit… Also, the people who will really get hit are retirees. Half of all dividends in this country go to people over the age of 65. Suddenly those people are going to be sitting on smaller investment funds, and they’re going to take hits on dividends because companies are going to reassess their dividend plans.”
Mike Ozanian asked, “Why do you want to punish the most successful people?”
Ya gotta understand: job creators are “creative people” — as Garry Trudeau put it:
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The ONLY thing we’ve seen come from tax cuts is allowing the wealthy (those supposed job creators) taking their money and then (1) investing OVERSEAS followed by (2) buying politicians. And I’d challenge McDonald to show me who’s behind all those folks on K Street. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that regular folks don’t have much impact on the K Street elite (and their fellow whores working DC’s other streets) but the people who benefit most from tax cuts do.
*A bit of a caveat: The Bush tax cuts MIGHT have been more successful if they’d been postponed after 9/11. (I dare say the success would’ve been even more if Dubya and his war criminal associates hadn’t decided to invade Iraq. And, in some parallel universe, there’s a USA where the tax cuts went into effect and 9/11 didn’t happen and there was no invasion of Iraq and ensuing war there, and the country is thriving. Heck, there may even be a parallel universe where the tax cuts happened and 9/11 happened and Iraq happened but THAT President Bush urged people to sacrifice for the war effort which led to more jobs being created. Of course, there’s also a parallel universe where Dubya and his Administration cronies and advisors were impeached or prosecuted in 2003 for their crimes connected with the war in Iraq, and the criminals’ personal fortunes were confiscated and used to pay off some of the government’s debt.)
