Dems must smell their own blood in the water for next year; they’re frantically trying to attack the notion that tax cuts help create jobs…
…in the minds of those who don’t check the facts.
This one’s been popping up on Twitter lately:
State-Level Tax Cuts Don’t Boost Job Growth Study Says bit.ly/X1m24L #wiunion #wiright #p2b #inunion #nhpolitics #stribpol #topprog
— America United (@Progress2day) May 31, 2013
So I looked at the link. It’s from “Think” Progress, which is always a good sign that you’re about to descend into the fever swamp.
And it says…:
The five states that implemented deep tax cuts during the 1990s experienced slower job growth over the next economic cycle than states that did not, and none of those states experienced income growth that exceeded inflation, CBPP found:
And what states were those?
The post doesn’t mention ’em. You have to look at the fine print on the handy graph they included:
Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts and New York?
Five states that were pretty much boom economies throughout the 2000s before the crash (perhaps because of the tax cuts in the 90s)? States that in most cases had very little room for job growth – before the crash (at which point the “study” conks out), anyway?
This is sort of like the Dems’ slur against Romney – the Massachusetts economy grew slower when he was Governor (because it was already pretty much steaming along at full bore)!
Distrust, but verify. Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.
As most here now, business decisions, actions and growth don’t occur in a week. Or a year. Example. ULine choose Hudson Wisconsin for their new warehouse. Decision made a year ago. It opens this fall. We are looking at 18 months…..lets say 24 months, from investigation of what to do, to final opening. Then related growth occurs after that. Spending by employees. Property tax income can be used. Spin business (servicing trucks for example), and then expansion of this facility occurs several years down the road.
It all starts with bring pro-business in 2010.
Its more of a long term thing. You have to be consistant with being pro-business and then get benefits over the long term.
The ‘massive tax cuts’ TP says are proposed by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker amount to less than 1% of planned spending.
When you critique press releases from outfits like Thinkprogress you have have to start from the beginning and verify every single statement. When they don’t lie outright, they mislead. For example, when talking about Walker’s planned tax cut in WI, TP repeats a claim from the partisan Wisconsin Budget Project :“The estimated cost of the tax cut is $342 million over the two year budget period. To put that amount in context, that is more than the state plans to spend on the entire Wisconsin technical college system over that period.”
They don’t tell you what the tax cut is in proportion to total spending, instead they compare it some number that no reader can relate to. As far as I can tell, the people at the ‘Wisconsin Budget Project’ have confused the budget of the state level ‘Wisconsin Technical College Board’ with the Wisconsin Technical College System’. The WI technical college system is financed primarily through local property taxes, not state income taxes.
Well, everyone knows TP stands fot Toilet Paper. That’s about how much their research is worth.
Well, yes, JPA. When they start a statement with ‘To put that amount in context . . . ‘ and then deliberately give poor context, they are probably trying to push a talking point ‘Walker is cutting technical college budgets for tax cuts for the Rich!’.
This makes it difficult to cut through the Dem noise machine. Documentation helps, though:
http://wistax.org/docs/facts/wis.-tech.-college-property-tax-levies-1989-90-to-2012-13.xls
The WI property tax levy for technical colleges has increased by between three hundred and four hundred percent since 1989-1990, by about 10% since the crash in property values in 2008.
In 2012, the total levy from all districts was about 786 million, or twice the total income tax cuts sought by Walker. The state level spending on technical colleges is about 20% of that total.
It’s an odd system. The local tech colleges are funded primarily by a tech college district property tax levy system. State law prohibits the levy from exceeding 1.5 mills of the district’s totals property valuation. Most (if not all) of the districts are at this level, so they can only increase their budget if the district’s property valuation goes up or the state kicks revenue down to them.
It is not a valid number to compare with proposed state level income tax cuts. It is the opposite of context, it’s like comparing the price of a bag of popcorn at a movie theater in the US with a family food budget in a third world country.
I think they should be talking to the state of New York. After all when I have Fox News on at night I see commercials all of the time showing that New York is open for business and cutting taxes.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN