Listening to Ignatieff right now on corporate tax cuts. He's asked about the Conservative argument that corporate tax cuts will create jobs.
He replies: I agree with the reports that say that corporate tax cuts will create jobs, but we should not cut taxes in a recession, we should wait for a surplus, and anyways, corporations don't need them anyways, they're doing fine.
It's hard to capture how many things were wrong with this backward-Keynes logic.
- corporate tax cuts don't create jobs. Corporations just bank the money. When compared with other ways to create jobs - eg., giving money to the poor, curring consumption taxes, etc. - corporate tax cuts are the *least* efficient way to create jobs.
- if you are going to advise a cyclic raising and lowering of taxes (and a corresponding raising and lowering of spending), then you lower taxes and raise spending in a recession, the opposite during a boom.
- Corporations are not doing OK. Some - the very largest - are doing fine. But small and medium sized businesses in Canada continue to struggle, because they depend on local consumers for earnings, and local consumers are being laid off by the large corporations and by government.
Sorry to comment on the picture post, but your political coverage never gets to this level of detail.
3 comments:
w4gw4eg
That's just adorable. Thanks for the post.
Listening to Ignatieff right now on corporate tax cuts. He's asked about the Conservative argument that corporate tax cuts will create jobs.
He replies: I agree with the reports that say that corporate tax cuts will create jobs, but we should not cut taxes in a recession, we should wait for a surplus, and anyways, corporations don't need them anyways, they're doing fine.
It's hard to capture how many things were wrong with this backward-Keynes logic.
- corporate tax cuts don't create jobs. Corporations just bank the money. When compared with other ways to create jobs - eg., giving money to the poor, curring consumption taxes, etc. - corporate tax cuts are the *least* efficient way to create jobs.
- if you are going to advise a cyclic raising and lowering of taxes (and a corresponding raising and lowering of spending), then you lower taxes and raise spending in a recession, the opposite during a boom.
- Corporations are not doing OK. Some - the very largest - are doing fine. But small and medium sized businesses in Canada continue to struggle, because they depend on local consumers for earnings, and local consumers are being laid off by the large corporations and by government.
Sorry to comment on the picture post, but your political coverage never gets to this level of detail.
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