Simple Lesson in Economics

Let's say you win some kind of odd lottery and you have two options for payout:

(1) You can have 50 people pay you $1,000 a year for the next 10 years

or

(2) You can have 100 people pay you $750 a year for the next 10 years

Which one would you take? The answer is pretty simple, right? Apparently not for our government. They would rather take $1,000 a year from a few people than smaller amounts from a lot of people.

Can someone please point me to one time in history where a tax increase stimulated an economy? Just one. Saying a tax increase brings in more money for the government ignores everything except for the fact that you have an immediate, short-term, temporary increase in revenue.

Amanda and I own a small business. By small, I mean we have 5 employees. If our sales start to pick up and we have more and more customers coming in, we'll need to hire an additional person to keep up with the pace. Now, let's assume the government increases our taxes to help pay for something it wants to do. It also increases taxes on our 5 employees. Does the government get more money initially? Sure it does. It gets the difference between what we and our employees were paying collectively and what we're collectively paying now. The drawback is that with increased costs, we can't afford to hire anymore employees.

Wouldn't it make more sense to either decrease our taxes or leave them alone? In doing so, we could afford to hire an additional employee and the government would then be getting additional tax revenue from that new employee in addition to the same revenue it was getting before from us and our 5 other employees. If the government actually decreased our taxes, we might even be able to hire more than one new employee to try to grow our business rather than just keeping pace with current business. Extrapolate this across America, and it's easy to see why a broader tax base is a much better way to increase tax revenue than increasing taxes on existing tax payers.

The honest truth is, the democrats know all this, but they would rather punish the successful than require everyone to chip in. History shows that when you raise taxes on businesses and the wealthy, jobs suffer. When jobs suffer, people suffer. It really is a simple concept that gets largely ignored by our government. I, for one, am sick of it. Why should I seek to excel in my job if I'm only going to be punished by higher taxes? Socialism kills innovation and hard work. Just look at the former Soviet Union. In just a few more years, we might be able to say, "just look at post-2009 America."