The New Hampshire State Senate has proposed language to lower the Business Enterprise Tax and the Business profits Tax beginning in 2017. The proposed change would reduce the BPT by 0.4% and the BET by 0.075% (in total) by the end of 2019, but can we even call this “flirting” with tax reform?
Don’t get me wrong. I think any incremental shift in business taxes is necessary but I don’t think this ‘pinch’ is sending anyone a message unless it is a message in a bottle tossed into the ocean.
Despite that, at least one Democrat in the New Hampshire Senate (speaking for all I suspect because none of them like tax cuts of any kind) has taken issue with this tiny proposed reduction in statutory confiscation from New Hampshire’s job creators.
Seacoast Online reported his objection as follows…(ditto for NPR and the Concord Monitor by the way)
“I believe we should be building an economy from the bottom up,” said Sen. Jeff Woodburn.
What ‘bottom’ is that, Senator Woodburn?
What is the Democrat State Senate go-to economic “bottom” when it comes to jobs and commerce if not the small business owners whose wallets would be (to borrow a phrase) at least three-thin-dimes heavier thanks to this “generous” re-re-distribution of wealth back to the people who created it?
I think it vital that we get him (Woodburn) or them (Democrats) on the record because if there is another bottom out there I’d like to know where it is and why Jeff Woodburn believes he (and a small cadre of well-intentioned experts) is more qualified to give it a friendly lift.
We can certainly speculate.
History, rhetoric, even policy tell us that New Hampshire Democrats are adherents of the Marx School of redistributive bottom pinching. The Jeff Woodburn’s of the world believe that the best way to stimulate an economic bottom is to pinch it with other people’s property.
Oh, look. The Government got bigger, public unions got fatter, and my reelection coffers are cheeky with pirate gold, but the economy still sucks. We didn’t tax the peasants enough!
The Democrat solution is always to raise taxes. Raise taxes on the job engines of New Hampshire (instead of lowering them) to build from the bottom up. After all, those business owners don’t know what they are doing. We need to take money those folks might have spent on products, expansions, or employees, and spend it properly.
“Properly” takes the form of handouts to bottom feeders; preferred interests, boondoggles, green energy ‘start-ups’ “started-up” to milk Jeff Woodburn’s small-business tax-fed cows (see also boondoggles), or other priorities, few if any or which are in the same sphere as those of the business owners from whom the Jeff Woodburn’s of the Democrat world relived the money in the first place.
So the policy must be – we tax job creators because, to be honest, they’re not doing it right, the “it” being all the ways (economically stimulating or not) the progressive mind can imagine spending other people’s money. (The corollary to that, by the way, is “however much of their property you took last year, it will never be enough for next year.”)
But that’s just speculation (even if it is based on observational facts, evidence).
Perhaps some nice person in the paid and professional media will corner Mr. Woodburn and ask him to go on the record about the “economic bottom” to which he refers, in case we’ve misinterpreted the meaning in the entrails left behind by years of left-wing policy mules.
I think the business owners of New Hampshire deserve to hear the response. I think taxpayers, the unemployed–including those who once held the 11,440 jobs that disappeared from NH since 2008–deserve to know why letting job creators keep their own money so they can create jobs is not a useful activity for an NH State Senator to engage in.
