The Collegian
Sunday, May 12, 2024

The American Jobs Act?

If you sat through President Obama's speech last Friday and did not get at least a hint of chills and some extra hope to put in your pocket for later, you might want to consider calling nurse Dial-A-Nurse.

Who doesn't want to "out build, out educate and out innovate" the competition? Who doesn't want to believe his/her country is the "engine and envy" of the world?

As much as I do, I cannot ignore the weakness of the plan behind the rhetoric and catchy phrases of Obama's speech.

The American Jobs Act fails to take into account the complexity of the current economic situation and instead focuses on temporary solutions.

For example, Obama mentioned finally making millionaires and billionaires pay their "fair share."

But before you join the wave and start chanting "four more years," stop to consider what exactly is fair and who exactly Obama is talking about when he refers to the wealthy.

Consider the Congressional Research Center's report that 47 percent of Americans paid no income taxes in 2009.

According to the Wall Street Journal's report of the IRS's 2008 tax statistics, people earning more than $114,000 paid 69 percent of all income taxes. So the top 10 percent of taxpayers are already paying almost 70 percent of all income taxes, while nearly 50 percent of Americans are paying no income taxes at all.

Consider that the majority of Obama's planned tax increases are aimed at those taxpayers making more than $250,000 a year, not only those making millions and billions of dollars.

The shortsighted nature of the American Jobs Act is clear when you examine Obama's claim that the Act targets small business growth.

He mentioned several tax credits and tax breaks for businesses that hire new workers in his speech.

Yet as the Wall Street Journal pointed out earlier this week, those same small businesses could end up paying $240 billion more in taxes in 2013 as a result of several planned tax increases and the expiration of other tax cuts.

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Don't be fooled into thinking future tax increases will only affect certain people and huge businesses like Walmart. Even if a tax only applies to certain taxpayers, it still affects the 4.5 million small businesses that file their tax returns under that particular tax code.

Obama is essentially suggesting the federal government take money from 4.5 million successful small businesses and then invest it more wisely than the owners might have.

For example, the federal government might choose to invest in an otherwise failing green energy company like Solyndra.

Sure, federal subsidies to green energy companies have doubled over the past few years, but as Stephen Moore, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, kindly pointed out, solar and wind power industries supply a whole 2.4 percent of America's electricity!

Small business owners really are not as dense as Obama seems to think they are and they can certainly see past the promised tax credits for hiring to the increased taxes certain to follow.

Any growth caused by his plan would be temporary at best. Millions of small businesses and therefore millions of Americans would suffer as a result. The people he speaks to so passionately aren't dense either.

Inspiring speech President Obama. I'm about to hit the books. But forgive me if I'm not quite ready to shake off that anxiety you mentioned.

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