Posted on 02/17/2012 2:50:06 PM PST by JediJones
Rick Santorum is touting his promise to eliminate corporate taxes on manufacturers...[that's] coming under scrutiny from conservatives who are decrying it as thoroughly unconservative.
...[Santorum] added: “We need to have a manufacturing base in this economy. Why? Because of our national security.”
...advocates for other sectors of the economy quietly gripe that they’d be effectively underwriting manufacturing...by paying a higher tax rate...
“Giving a preferential rate is picking winners and losers through the tax code,” said Curtis Dubay, a tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation...
“This is not free-market economics, this is trying to tilt the market toward manufacturing, and it will hurt the economy rather than help it, because resources would be artificially diverted from other sectors...”
Kevin Hassett...at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Santorum’s plan would “create the biggest tax dodge in history,” as businesses raced to redefine themselves as manufacturers.
“How do you define manufacturing?” asked Andy Roth of the conservative Club for Growth. “Do movie studios manufacture films? ...are [book publishers] manufacturing books? Companies are going to game this.”
...Romney has tried to paint Santorum as a big spender and a friend of labor unions from his days as a Pennsylvania senator.
[Santorum] said...“...it’s not like there’s a better way to make things in these other countries. It’s just the cost is higher here because of our tax and regulatory structure.”
But conservatives worry that when Santorum talks about the issue, he sounds a bit too much like President Obama, who has made revitalizing manufacturing a key plank of his economic platform.
“There’s a natural evolution of our economy toward high-intellectual-capital things like software — that’s not manufacturing, and that’s OK,” Hassett said. “To say that trend is something we should reverse through tax policy is just the height of economic illiteracy. It’s inexcusable.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thedaily.com ...
My memory might be failing me but I can’t remember any other of Romney’s conservative challengers getting as much heat as Santorum on this site.
Not Trump, not Bachmann, not Perry, not Cain, and not Gingrich when they were the top polling conservatives at least.
That's all true. Of course, he left out the part of how Fed inflation eats away at our capital, but maybe he doesn't know about that. Nonetheless, politicians should not attempt to pick winners and losers in the economy.
Make the tax code such that the market can decide where to invest. I wouldn't be opposed at all to a Santorum nomination, but St. Rick is sometimes a bit too clever by half.
What articles support that and which jobs does it suggest are coming back?
Cheap labor elsewhere and increases in technology have a detrimental effect on manufacturing jobs.
Did I miss the memo that says conservatives are no longer against corporate taxes? Because I thought we really wanted to eliminate the corporate tax rate altogehter, because it’s just double-taxation that gets passed on to consumers and makes domestic business uncompetitive.
(Well, I know Cain wanted a 9% corporate tax rate, but that was still a lot smaller than the current tax rate).
I think the most important tax issue, but the hardest to win the public on, is the corporate tax rate. We are the 2nd highest in the developed world. Our personal taxes, while higher than I would like, are not ridiculous and are not what is destroying our economy. Most people here probably fall in the 25-33% bracket, but our average is probably a little over 20%, which is where the Fair Tax has an ideal rate.
But corporate taxes do affect jobs. But too many voters dont want to hear that lowering the corporate tax will free up money for new jobs or allow for current jobs to pay better.
Yes, you missed the memo as to what Newt and Rick’s policies are on the corporate tax rate, which is posted right in this thread, for all to see which one has the more conservative policy:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2848044/posts#18
Hey Rick, quit picking winners a losers.
Try across-the-board tax cuts and reduced spending.
“There’s a natural evolution of our economy toward high-intellectual-capital things like software — that’s not manufacturing, and that’s OK,” Hassett said. “To say that trend is something we should reverse through tax policy is just the height of economic illiteracy. It’s inexcusable.”
Actually, if you paid any attention to the timing, Santorum had the manufacturing idea out there BEFORE Obama. Also, software is being offshored too, and everyone is not equipped to be a software engineer in any case. Santorum is suggesting that where it's reasonable provide some incentive for people to be able to make a living without an advanced degree. Heaven forbid it violates pristine free market economics, but considering we're all owners of the largest automobile company in the world at the moment, it doesn't strike me as extreme for some reason.
If you’re getting heat from the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Club for Growth, as shown in this article, then you might not deserve the “conservative” label as much as you think you do.
Then we can’t criticize Ron Paul either, because he’s the sole opponent on the ballot against Romney in Virginia.
I say we stick to allowing truthful criticism of every candidate’s liberal policies as long as a source is linked and provided, especially if it contains quotes from conservative individuals and institutions.
No. Perhaps you missed the article.
It criticizes targeted tax cuts.
Then Obama will have succeeded at shifting the country to the left. By moving his party to the left, the Republicans no longer need to be as conservative as they used to be to distinguish themselves. Newt always talks about trying to move the country to the right that way. That's the direction we need to go in.
“Yeah, we need a man who will push for things like moon colonies.”
Yes. That idea is as stupid as moving out of caves, or making dugout canoes. Crazy talk.
There's no "tried to paint" about it at all. It's just shedding some badly needed sunlight on the senator's record.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
The Heritage Foundation that backed a health care mandate?
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/06/dont-blame-heritage-for-obamacare-mandate/
Is the individual mandate at the heart of “ObamaCare” a conservative idea? Is it constitutional? And was it invented at The Heritage Foundation? In a word, no.
I headed Heritage’s health work for 30 years. And make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate...
Nevertheless, the myth persists.
The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through “adverse selection” (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.
My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid “with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”
But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on “catastrophic” costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.
And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the “mandate” was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.
Yes, why go to the moon? What rational country would ever think that was a good idea? Except of course for the U.S.A. in past years and China and Russia now.
Pretty much the same modus operandi for all the anti-Perry posters a few months ago.
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