Absolutely incomprehensible: lower levels of taxation hurt economy?
A report from a nobody claims (via Now! Hampshire)
Franklin was chosen for the report because it has the longest history in the state with a spending cap, said Gottlob, who is the principal of PolEcon Research of Dover and who considers himself a fiscal conservative. The report and its conclusion were meant to be non-political, although he acknowledged that the subject matter is inherently political.
“The expenditure cap in place in Franklin for nearly two decades has clearly resulted in lower levels of local government expenditures than comparable communities in New Hampshire,” the report began, adding that “the lower level of property tax-supported spending in Franklin is largely the result of lower spending on education, in part, because Franklin receives more state education aid per pupil than almost any other city in New Hampshire except Berlin.
How is the quality of education measured in the dollar amount of education spending? If I take a stack of $100 bills and set them on fire, in the name of education, and I make sure that it is entered as education spending in the accounting books, have I benefited the education system, or have I just burned money (and broken federal laws about not burning money)?
The excerpts from this utterly incomprehensible report continues with similar nonsense, such as that tax caps are “a race to the bottom”. I think I like that race to the bottom. As a resident of California, I would hope that Californian legislators would look at the outflow of their population and start offering more competitive local tax rates. I mean, it would be too late for me, but perhaps someone else will decide not to move out of California if the sales tax were, for one, no longer at the level of tithing.
I mean, are you better off with WalMart moving into your town—putting a downward pressure on price of everything—or with Starbucks moving into your town—putting upward pressure on price of coffee and increasing the supply of elitist assholes? How could it be worse for people to keep more of their own money? Are you hurt by the fact that you weren’t robbed at gunpoint today?
For what it’s worth, the residents of city of Franklin also do not comprehend this report:
The people of Franklin, said Merrifield, “are the best judge of the impact of the tax cap and they have lived with this the longest and I think that everybody in our community would say that we’re better off than before we adopted the tax cap.”
He said Franklin voters “have had numerous opportunities to remove the tax cap or alter it to allow for greater spending and the voters have routinely sided with the strictest interpretation. If we were to hold a referendum on this measure today, I would be very surprised to see it overturned.”
Remember this when some other sophist or tax-supported academic tries to tell you that more tax is good: the greatest accomplishments in this country, such as the invention of light bulb and the invention of automobile, happened at a time when there was zero (peacetime) federal income tax and very low local taxes. If we could do that with so little taxes, then less tax cannot possibly be so bad.