Unspeakable Heresy from the Wall Street Journal!!
 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...865544254.html

Arizona?s Budget Breakthrough
An alternative to California?s tax and spend model.

Perhaps states are starting to learn the right fiscal lessons from the red-ink blowouts in high-tax California and New York. Today, the legislature in Arizona will vote on a tax reform designed to entice more employers and high-income taxpayers to the state. Sponsored by Republican Governor Jan Brewer, the plan would cut state property taxes, the corporate tax and personal income taxes, in exchange for a temporary rise in the sales tax.

Most economic studies agree that states have more jobs and higher income growth when they tax consumption rather than savings, investment and business profits. This explains why most of the nine states with no income tax at all?such as Texas, Florida and Tennessee?have been economic high-flyers in recent decades.

Ms. Brewer?s proposal reflects this economic logic. Effective January 1, 2011, her plan would reduce the state?s corporate income tax rate to 4.86% from 6.97%, which would be one of the largest business tax cuts in the nation in recent years. The proposal also cuts all personal income tax rates by 6.6%, thus lowering the top marginal rate to 4.24% from 4.54%. A hated statewide tax on commercial and residential property would also be abolished.

Arizona has been hit especially hard by the housing slump, and its budget woes were compounded thanks to former Governor Janet Napolitano?s spending spree before she joined the Obama cabinet. On her watch the budget grew by more than 50% in five years?to $10.2 billion from $6.5 billion in 2004. The state now has a $1 billion budget gap, and to close it the legislature will also vote on a one percentage point increase in the sales tax to 6.6% in 2010 and 2011; in the third year the sales tax would fall to 6.1%, and in the fourth year would revert to its current 5.6% rate.

We?d rather see the legislature cut more spending than raise the sales tax, but on the other hand the sales tax would only take effect if it is approved on the November ballot. The political class is giving voters a say in the matter. The sales tax increase also has the advantage of a built-in expiration date, while the tax cuts are permanent.

Democratic opponents are calling this a tax giveaway to big business. But lawmakers needn?t apologize for trying to retain Arizona?s status as a business-friendly state?particularly when jobs are so scarce. Small employers also benefit from the lower property tax rates and the personal income tax reductions. Lower tax payments will enable them to reinvest more in their enterprises.

The opponents should consult a new study of state business taxes by former U.S. Treasury economist Robert Carroll for the Tax Foundation. He examined 50 states and found that states with lower corporate tax rates have higher wage gains and more productivity over time. This tax cut sounds like a high-return investment.

Republicans control both houses of the Arizona legislature, and as we went to press the main obstacle to passing the reform was the Arizona Senate?s antitax conservatives. They oppose the higher sales tax. These Republicans should look to one of the triumphs of the Reagan Presidency, the 1986 tax reform, which broadened the tax base but substantially lowered tax rates and thus sustained the 1980s expansion.

Arizona has the chance to be the anti-California, closing the budget deficit by growing the economy, not by raising taxes. We hope legislators don?t blow it, because the U.S. desperately needs an alternative to the tax, spend and tax again philosophy of Sacramento and Albany.

Where is the "Unspeakable Heresy"?

Liberal State Legislatures with huge social programs don't get this concept... ie NY, CA, IL, and etc...

i'm sorry. i should have included instructions. all these little shapes that look like funny little symbols on the screen are called "letters" (not all of them though... so be careful!!)... they actually correspond to spoken sounds also called "words" - when looked at as a whole, its called "language"

what you do is you have to learn the sounds of the little symbols... then you learn how to put them together and form more complicated sounds (again called "words"). then you take those complicated sounds and arrange them in a special order to communicate ideas and thoughts and feelings or to describe things. you look at them from left to right... and top to bottom (tricky!)

the best part of language is that if you don't understand a "word" you can look it up in a catalog of words with their meanings. this book is called a dictionary. i've never seen one up close, but i've heard many stories about their usefulness, usually from Irish folk songs.

have someone help you search "google" for "english alphabet" and help you navigate the page and you should be at a great starting point!!!

i do wish you luck!

if you happen to progress to the point that a dictionary is an useful tool to you, look up "sarcasm"

Basically proposing increasing a regressive tax, that's my guess.

AZ is a conservative state though with Rs all the way through executive and legislature, so they have the ability enact policy.

CA is in a state of paralysis b/c of having too much direct input by the citizenry on issue after issue.

As for the economists of the Tax Foundation -- well of course any study from there will show whatever is in support of cutting taxes for the rich lol.

Where I come from we use capitalization to denote the beginning of sentences as well as proper nouns. This can be accomplished by holding down the "shift" key while depressing the appropriate letter. The "shift" key is located in two separate places on your keyboard for your convenience. If you are so inclined you may also use the CAPS lock key; pressing it once to keep capitalization on and again to toggle it off.

;)

They aren't really lowering any taxes...

Our trash, water, electricity, waste, business lic fees and most fees with that, leased/rent tax, property tax and good'ol sales taxes will be increasing here.

So making a drop happen at that % and at that by 2011, is a joke.

AZ is now the most expensive state I have ever done business in.

s far as "liberal" gov's of CA, IL and NY
NY has a tie in the state legislature between Rs and Ds, and has plenty of RandD govs.
CA has a R gov
IL goes back and forth as well.

NY,CA,IL have larger social programs yes that's true, but, they also have larger population density and more difficult issues to deal with than the smaller often largely rural subsidized states they are often compared to.

The Economist actually took a far more serious look at the differences between states in the U.S. and came to more interesting broader conclusions about comparing growth, taxes, education, quality of life, employment rates, salaries of the jobs, etc...

I'd advise anyone tempted to take the WSJ _opinion_ at face value to give that series in The Economist (~July 12 or so) a read.

sorry I got cut off trying to ammend my comment.

LOL -- They are trying to "prove" some supply-side ideological non-sense. I thought they had stopped teaching the Laffer curve haha.

hahaha.. nice!! :)

haahhaha

I wish all states would stop all funding for everything not education and medical related and then tell people if you want money find God and go to church...Plenty of bleeding hearts there.

Not sure that's the case here... The Laffer curve would not take into account the shift of taxation from supply side to consumption side. This seems to be more of a hybrid. Lowering personal and corporate taxes in itself in order to increase tax revenue would definitely be them trying to find the peak of the curve. Here they are increasing consumption tax (sales tax) to compensate for the loss of supply side taxes.

I tend to agree with more consumption tax rather than income taxes. Reason being is it puts more money in the hands of consumers. That's more money for things that aren't taxed like food and other requirements for living. It also allows individuals to save more money in their bank accounts if they chose not to spend it on taxable items.

Add to that a sales tax also gets money from tourists and other visitors to the state not to mention the many illegals who don't pay income taxes and often work under the table. They will now be paying some when they buy non-essential stuff.

Oh excellent point indeed :) That's how Florida has been able to stay afloat with no state income taxes. Disney/Universal/Sea World/you get the point.

Well played. :thumbsup

Interesting, but given the different effects I'm sure they can be some what isolated in an economic model -- after all there are always competing polices, distortions and influences in any actual economy.

I don't have enough information to do any sort of analysis on what AZ is proposing. The WSJ editorial board is so ideoligically driven I don't pay much attention anything they cite.

If you are for consumption taxes, how do you feel about the AZ proposed cut in property taxes?

Yeah, I bet Florida makes bank off the sales tax with the mass tourist that they get there.

Great article, thanks for posting it.

Rare common sense from a left of center publication.

WSJ left of center ?

:Oh crap

What's middle for you?

:uhoh

This is my own personal opinion and it won't be backed up by any cites or numbers, hahahha. But I feel that property taxes are the most justified tax in the United States. You own a piece of the United States, you pay a tax based on that property's value for protection provided by the US as well as the police department, fire department, public roads, etc...

However this tax would be considerably less if tax dollars weren't spent on a variety of different crap that the government truly doesn't have the authority to do.

So I guess in the end it's hard for me to separate my own personal ideals of property tax from the current application of the taxes since there's so much noise in between (if that makes sense) :P

As you stated, "after all there are always competing polices, distortions and influences in any actual economy."

Every time this Sate proposes something of this nature we all end up getting screwed, just like when they created the temporary tax for the Diamond backs baseball stadium! They were suppose to leave the tax in place to raise enough to pay for it but somehow forgot to remove the tax when it was completed. Well, that never happened, the tax was never removed.

The highway taxes they keep getting to expand, always seems’ to be miss appropriated and then they want more and the freeways totally suck.

The light rail is another waste of money. It was suppose to go in when the Cardinals stadium was built in phoenix and this was voted on, with a contingency....The stadium ended up being built in Glendale, but the city of Phoenix decided to go ahead and build this stupid light rail. Now they want even more money from us to extend it further around the city when it should have been scratched with the cardinal’s stadium blunder.

Not only that, when the city's fine engineers had crews assembling the track for the light rail, they did not use the correct method or saws required to cut lengths of the track and now the warranty is void and the track will have to be replaced in the near future....meaning years down the road if not sooner, at tax payers expense.

This town blatantly wastes money on shit like the big dildo downtown or what appears to look like a dildo, that costs 3 million dollars, toilets and decorations on the freeway walls so it looks pretty, at the tax payers expense…this was another blunder.

The list goes on and on………………………………

This morning on the news, it was reported that the state may have to find someone else to give them a credit card, so to speak, for more spending as the federal government will not be giving additional aid to the state because the it can not balance it's budget and it was also noted that the State may end up handing out IOU's to people it owes. I will assume that would be taxes they owe to citizens or vendors, possibly even employees, who knows.
Some employees have been asked to work a day free to help cut costs. I have a friend that works for the City of Phoenix and he has confirmed this. He has also mentioned the waste and blunders this city creates at tax payers’ expense is unbelievable.

I am so sick of their pork barrel spending that have decided to take my money now and pay at the end of the year…looks like I will be changing my State and Fed withholdings first thing tomorrow. At least I can earn interest on that money and this assures me I won’t be getting an IOU from them around tax time.

You would think these idiots would learn from their mistakes and frivolous spending?

On another note, any promises to lower taxes is just another lie by the system. There is no free lunch!

And another issue about house taxes in Phoenix. House values have dropped to almost half of what they were worth or appraised at, but the City of Phoenix is still collecting on the amount the home was appraised or financed for. So they are not giving anyone any good deal. It's just another smoke screen by the City.

There have been a few cases where home owners have gone to court and spend allot of money to get this crap reversed so they pay taxes of the actual home value. Most people do not have that kind of money to fight the machine so they just end up eating the tax mans bill.

Taxation without representation......:thumbsup

Several years ago in my state there was a ballot measure that put a cap on the percentage of property taxes they could put on a home owner without the vote of the people. It passed in a landslide because people were sick of seeing their property taxes go up and up. So within two years of that suddenly home values started to spike. The appraised value of a house hit the roof. Apparently that was the state telling the people if you are going to cap the percentage, we will just make your home worth more and get it that way.

Now, like in Arizona, a lot of home values have fallen way off, but the are still wanting property taxes for the old value. There are a lot of people who are now fighting it and they have filed to have the property value lowered so they pay less.

Oooo don't forget my absolute favorite. Federal Taxes were supposed to be abolished after we declared victory over World War II... Instead it mutated from a class tax to the primary source of revenue in 1943... That's why the US never declared victory. Instead Congress and the Senate had many meetings on how they could keep taxing the American people to grow the government. Not many people know that but it's all recorded and some of the verbiage people were using in the house and senate is quite appalling to me as it quite obviously was about the government's own self interest NOT about the peoples' best interests...

smoke and mirrors, if anyone believes the shit in that article i've got some land to sell you!

Do you happen to have a link to this. I would be interested in hearing/ reading this?

I remember my grandfather speaking of something similar when I was young and the trilateral commission.... the evil eye watching you.

Yep :thumbsup

I like the french fries, but it would more appealing if there was a pile of mayo next to them.

Nothing like fries with mayo....guess its a European thing that I grew to love :winkwink:

Rich people are soooo full of themselves it's not even funny.

If they really don't like it, just move. I mean that's what they're always saying is going to happen right. If they don't get their way, they'll just move. They'll be FORCED to move.

Move already.

Yeah I love how they mention TN as some sort of proper way of doing things. yeah no state income tax. I'm also paying 9.75% sales tax on most things. Even food the sales tax is 8.25%. We have some counties with unemployment as high as 25% so I'm not sure where this economic boon is they were tlalking about.