{"id":4697,"date":"2009-04-30T07:26:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T12:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4697"},"modified":"2009-04-30T07:26:14","modified_gmt":"2009-04-30T12:26:14","slug":"pushing-hose-up-a-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4697","title":{"rendered":"Pushing Hose Up A Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writing in the MinnPost:<\/a><\/p>\n

Then there’s an old but still important George McGovern op-ed. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1992, the South Dakota Democrat talked about how he had bought an inn in Connecticut four years earlier, but which had gone bankrupt in the interim. “In retrospect,” he acknowledged, “I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn’s 43-year leasehold.”Even more candidly and impressively, he wrote, “I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and more understanding presidential contender.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pearlstein notes that Minnesota wants to raise income taxes on “the rich” to between 9 and 9.25%.<\/p>\n

Now, remember – most <\/em>small businesses, including the ones that put so many Minnesotans into “the rich” category the DFL so wants to mug – are Subchapter S corporations.\u00a0 If you’re a small but successful business – a consultant, a freelance software architect, run a small but successful store, any kind of small business that is unlikely to ever “go public” and sell stock – you are probably an “S Corp”.\u00a0 Which means you pay your “corporate” taxes on your personal <\/em>tax return.\u00a0 Which makes you “rich”, according to the Minnesota Department of Revenue, while still being “kinda in between” in the real world.<\/p>\n

Minnesota wants to make life about 25% harder for those people – in a state whose taxes already verge on confiscatory:<\/p>\n

I’m not unmindful of how difficult it is to balance a biennial budget that’s almost $5 billion out of whack. But I’m more mindful and admiring all the time of what it takes to run a successful business and how dependent we are on the men and women who do so here \u2014 as opposed to the overwhelming majority of other states with lower tax burdens. (Note: The personal income taxes of many business owners are based on their companies’ revenues.)<\/p>\n

So two impertinently pertinent questions:<\/p>\n

Do these proposals sound as if they were designed by people who truly know what it takes to conceive, create, and run a business?<\/p>\n

Even more to the point, do these plans sound like promising ways of encouraging entrepreneurial people to set up shop in Minnesota and then stick around?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both of them are rhetorical questions.\u00a0 The DFL’s big stakeholders – the big public employee and teachers unions – are run by people who’ve never had the faintest shred of entrepreneurial interest; indeed, many of them (like my guest on last Saturday’s NARN show, union organizer Alan Maki) actively detest entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

We have government of, by and for big institutions in Minnesota today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writing in the MinnPost: Then there’s an old but still important George McGovern op-ed. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1992, the South Dakota Democrat talked about how he had bought an inn in Connecticut four years earlier, but which had gone bankrupt in the interim. “In retrospect,” he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}