…that raising taxes in a recession isn’t face-palmingly stupid:
“In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February (month-to-date) sales are a total disaster,” wrote Murray in a February 12 email to executives. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my (about) 7 years with the company.”
The recent hike in payroll taxes is dragging down sales for discount retailers like Wal-Mart. With less disposable cash in their wallets, lower-income shoppers have less to spend.
The bad news comes on the heels of a lackluster January for the major retailer.
“Have you ever had one of those weeks where your best-prepared plans weren’t good enough to accomplish everything you set out to do?” wrote Walmart Vice President for U.S. Replenishment Cameron Geiger in a February 1 email to Walmart executives. “Well, we just had one of those weeks here at Walmart U.S. Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?”
If we – the “middle class” – have 5% less money between payroll taxes and Obamacare, then that’s 5% less to spend at Walmart. Or Patagonia, or MPR’s pledge drive, or what have you.
Most of us know this.
Democrats in DC and Saint Paul, it seems, do not.
Walmart is a bellwether of the economy. Strap yourselves in folks, we’re about to encounter some turbulence. Question is: how will dems blame this on the GOP?
With the help of the media, of course.
Increasing taxes reduces marginal consumption. This is as bedrock a law in market economics as the 2nd law of thermodynamics is in physics.
Obama and his enablers have cynically decided that it more important that politicians have money to spend than that people will have jobs. They get away with it because the media is their lapdog.
They will blame the GOP under the rubric, “Now look what you’ve gone and made me do.”
The total Obama tax increase amount to about 200 billion/year, 150 billion/yr from the middle class via the payroll tax increase (so much for the ‘millionaires and billionaires paying their fair share rhetoric).
Imagine how much taxes would have to go up to eliminate our trillion dollar deficits People making 50k/yr would pay $10k/year in federal income tax.
Democrats in St Paul may not know this. I firmly believe Democrats in DC DO know this and they are pushing this along in order to get more people dependent on government entitlement handouts and therefore vote for the party that specializes in handing out government entitlements.
I keep hoping that we can get to a point where we could have an intelligent discussion about “is this use of taxpayer money really a better idea than letting a drunk squander it on cheap gin?”.
But I evidently am dreaming!