The Dayton Dust Bowl: When The Well Goes Dry
By Mitch Berg
The Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute “Poligraph”feature did provide some thorough fact checking on Dayton’s income tax proposals and found they came up short on revenue.
The report called Dayton’s plan to raise $4 billion from raising taxes “wishful thinking”; the plan doesn’t account for the fact that people with money will likely change their behavior to pay less taxes. People react in their own best interests, generally; it’s human nature. Even DFLers.
That leads, of course, to an ever-expanding game of fiscal cat and mouse; the “rich” – all those cops and teachers and pharmacists and entrepreneurs and mid-level business analysts – work harder and harder to shift money out of taxable status, which causes less revenue to come in, which further drops the revenue projections, which requires the state to further lower the definition of “rich”.
It was, of course, beyond the MPR/HHHI scope to calculate exactly how short the projections will actually fall. The fact is, Dayton himself thinks one needs a “supercomputer” to figure it out; he hasn’t figured it out either.
September 3rd, 2010 at 7:23 pm
This does not require a supercomputer. Some states have passed “millionaire” and “half-millionaire” income tax surcharges. The results are debatable. Of course, Dayton’s surcharge hits “one-eight millionaires”.
Beware of obfusticating “arguments” from liberals. If the percentage of state taxpayers in these surcharge states see a decrease of returns in the affected bracket, they blame the poor economy or insist that the relative decrease of wealthy to non-wealthy taxpayers indicates that the increased expenditure on public goods has made the state more attractive to middle-income taxpayers (WTF!!).
If the percentage of tax returns in the surcharged bracket increases, well, that, too, proves the surcharge worked. There is no honesty in these people, no desire to find a factual answer to a question. They just want the money.
September 4th, 2010 at 8:35 am
Hah, “wishful thinking”. More like Lala Land.
September 6th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Tax The Rich never works. Progressives always forget that the Rich are Rich, not Stupid.
There’s a reason Massachussets Senator John Kerry parks his $7 million yacht across the bay in Rhode Island instead of in his home state: he saved $500,000 in taxes.
He’s rich, not stupid. He takes steps to minimize his taxes while allowing himself to have his little perks, which is completely legal and sensible.
Mark Dayton’s 2009 income tax return shows no income from work, only from capital gains and dividends. Plainly, he’s already following Kerry’s path and you can bet most of the “rich” people in Minnesota are, too.
How thick do you have to be to fall for the same lie over and over?
.