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An email exchange regarding skepticism of Obama.
By Mark | November 6, 2008
An email I received this morning:
Hey Mark - I wanted to ask you, how do you think I should respond to this? - Roisen
Brianne Hassell (Sugarland, TX) wrote
at 3:26pm yesterday
I’m certainly NOT defending the last 8 years! Bush and congress spent money like it grows on trees. But you add Obama’s fiscal policies into that mix, and this country will be completely bankrupt within our lifetimes. Studies have shown that tax cuts actually INCREASE revenue while tax hikes decrease it. Taxing the most productive segments of our society even more than they’re already burdened with will cause decreased profits and job loss for all of us. Europe has already figured this out, and begun lowering their corporate rates. The US, on the other hand, is already at the highest margin around the world and Obama would make that even higher:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_worldSo no, I don’t think we’ve circumvented the future, I think we’ve just accelerated it. And unless America prepares to put a stop to this madness soon and put the brakes on our government’s spending, this current economic crisis is only the beginning of some really rough times.
Here was my response:
Hiya Roisen!
I have three responses:
1) You can refute the assumptions with your left brain.
Corporate taxes are not high at all in the US. The RATE is a high published number, but most corporations take advantage of inducements, breaks, and incentives. The GAO published a study, cited in Reuters, about this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1249465620080812?sp=true
U.S. Corporations, when the books are actually tallied, don’t pay as much as they would in many industrialized nations. This, by the way, is not a bad thing. We want to keep taxes low, as Brianne said, and the tax code is structured in such a way as to encourage corps to do the right thing in order to keep them low. Giving tax breaks for being environmentally friendly, for example, is a way to keep taxes lower AND promote green practices. Obama’s plan to give tax breaks to companies that keep jobs in the US, where there are health care, safety, and environmental requirements, is great, and it penalizes companies that register here (Hellooooo, Delaware) but ship jobs oversees where the standards are lower and the quality of life for the workers suffer. And, again, this is a TAX BREAK for American companies.
2) You can look at the statement with your right brain.
You friend Brianne is going through a political loss; you and I went through the same thing four years ago. Remember how frustrated and angry you were? And how alienated you felt from your fellow citizens? That is what some of our conservative friends are going through. We all deal with disappointment differently, and for some of us that means picking fights. There is bound to be anger, and sense that other people just don’t have all the facts or are unwilling to look at the facts; we should be as patient with them as we’d want them to be with us when are disappointed (and have been, thank you, 2004).
3) You can look at it with your heart.
We need your friend to keep the Democrats honest. She’s right; we need to pay down the budget. There are people who will want to take advantage of the Dem sweep to push through as much as we can with no input from the right. That would be wrong. We should try and build as broad a coalition as possible, and then what changes we make will be more permanent. The only reason we were able to elect a black constitutional lawyer as president is that enough people from BOTH the left and the right acknowledge that there is nothing wrong, whatsoever, with having a different skin color. Not everyone of course, but, again, we just need enough. The same should hold true for all issues we care about, like the environment or education. The Republicans in opposition will keep us in check, and that is exactly what will keep us strong and what will hopefully keep us doing the right things.
4) You can look at it with your bladder.
Maybe Brianne is right! Maybe we’re all crazy and/or wrong and this isn’t a watershed moment, and that Obama is gonna raise crazy-high taxes. Then again, maybe we’re right; maybe this is an epoch-changing election and presidency, and one day future generations will envy us our chance to live through it. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. That is pragmatism; if parts of Obama’s plan are working well, I hope Brianne will acknowledge it and pitch in. If parts of his plan are working poorly, I hope we’ll be able to acknowledge it and work to alter them. The only tests of truth are time and results. We’ve drunk the Kool-aid, you and I, and whether it takes 100 days, a year, or a term, we’ll will all see what happens when we finally pee.
Does that help?
- Marko
The names, of course, have been altered to protect people from being labeled as friends of mine.
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