Saturday, November 19, 2011

Enlightening speech on C-Span

Sitting at work yesterday one of the few channels that I have available to me is C-Span. Most of the time it takes about 10 minutes before I'm bored and have on. However a speech that was given by Congressman Rob Woodhall (R-GA 7th) I found extremely interesting.

Most of what I found interesting was the back and forth between him and Rep Steve King (R-IA 5th) about tax rates and hidden taxes. We'll get to that in a minute though.



The first thing that Rep Woodhall was talking about was the "free golf cart credit" that was available from 2009-2010. It was actually called the Electric Car Credit, however with some simple ingenuity you could get yourself  a free golf cart. See all that was required originally was for you to have taken delivery by Dec 31 2009. It was required to have seat belts, rear view mirrors, and brake lights. Add those to your new golf cart and boom, free $6500 rebate courtesy of the US government. The amount of problems with this theory are pretty lengthy, but this didn't even improve US made golf carts. Nope those cost too much money, Chinese built, however could be had for a shade under the $6500. So congrats to Obama again they tried to pick winners in the electric car business and instead improved business for Chinese golf cart makers.

After he got past that part he started in on the current rate of 35% and how that is making the US uncompetitive in the world market. So as he showed with the graph he had with him, he showed how our tax rate has been pretty much unchanged for quite some time. While I agree with him in the sense that an unchanging rate should/would help business plan for the future. The problem with this is that when the rest of the world is significantly less, it gives even more motivation to move your business else where.

So Steve King asked the question of why not a 0% corporate/business tax rate. Now much like some people would scream, that would cause us to have to pay more as individuals. What Rep King did was make a beautiful explanation of how we are the only payers now. All taxes and admin costs associated with taxes are already passed along to the consumer. He went on to talk about the 22% hidden tax rate that includes their income taxes and the payroll taxes that are already imbedded in the cost.

I tried to find a video of this because as far as C-Span goes it was pretty intriguing. I was a little skeptical of the 0 tax rate that King brought up but as he went on to explain it, the more it made sense. Why not make businesses have the ultimate motivation to come do business in this country? Think about the growing tax base that you would have with the sudden increase in growth expansion and business start-ups that would happen.

Now couple that with a flatter broader tax code that is not 76,000 pages long and you might find a way to grow this economy to heights that have never been seen.

Over under on how loud Dems scream about this idea?

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