-------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [Politech] Thomas Lipscomb on why NY,CA are anti-jobs and losing tech firms Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:34:18 -0000 From: adam beecher <lists@private> Organization: BEECHER.NET To: 'Declan McCullagh' <declan@private>, 'Thomas Lipscomb' <tom@private> > maintain a "socially just civil society." > > We have now had almost a half century of examples that lower > taxes yields higher returns > You might want to pop back up to the "socially just civil society" bit in the previous paragraph there Thomas. Us "diseased" Europeans like to think that there's more to life than "higher returns". > lying local government. Real European businessmen are now > investing in plants in the United States and Europe is > atrophying as more and more of its capital and major > corporations flee to more advantages sites that remain > You mean major corporations like Google, eBay/Paypal and Amazon? Funny that they all just moved major operations to Ireland then. Ireland's still in Europe, isn't it? adam -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [Politech] Thomas Lipscomb on why NY,CA are anti-jobs and losing tech firms Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:11:05 -0500 From: Thomas Lipscomb <tom@private> To: adam beecher <lists@private> I think you missed the point.... Ireland, like Estonia and Finland, is barely in Europe... they all have these embarrassingly high GDPs that the Eurocops seem to want to penalize. I predict that in a decade things will be so bad in Europe that countries like those and the UK will be joining NAFTA. As for what "us 'diseased' Europeans like to think," who cares? After wasting your primacy in the world in bloodbaths over the past century, and whacko experiments with fascism and communism, all that is left of you is a bunch of nattering white rabbits with pink eyes. Don't tell anyone, but you are irrelevant Americans are tired of pulling Europe out of the ditch. What Prince Schwartzenberg said of Russia's assistance in putting down Austria's sputtering 1848 revolution applies to Europe's attitudes toward the US today: "We will astonish you with our ingratitude." So enjoy Eurabia. After all what is a welfare state for if freeloaders from all over the world can't enjoy it while it lasts? What can be more in the Brussel's spirit than a common language? Too bad it had to be Arabic. Europe has its uses, of course, as a source of flight capital and outsourced customer service centers, until Asian expertise rises sufficiently to offer the same service at "higher returns" for "major corporations" in the United States. Get your green card and bring your Euro's..... while they are still worth something. You can always visit a lovely museum called "Europe" from here... like we do. Tom -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Politech] Thomas Lipscomb on why NY, CA are anti-jobs and losing tech firms Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 11:48:16 -0400 From: Stephen Downes <stephen@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> References: <41FF0A65.6020802@private> Declan McCullagh wrote: > From: Thomas Lipscomb <tom@private> > We have now had almost a half century of examples that lower taxes yields > higher returns, and that investment money follows real incentives rather > than scenic locations and lying local government... > Ecuador, of course, has very low taxes, and yet there isn't a rush of investment or businesses looking to locate there. Argentina, which has recently defied IMF demands that it cut spending and social services, has enjoyed a resurgence. Taxes are only one variable in a complex relation; investors will trade a certain level of taxation for a certain level of infrastructure, such as policing, transportation, utilities and more. This level varies according to the type of business and the needs of employees. There is in fact no such generalization showing that lower taxes lead to greater returns, and it is misleading in the extreme to suggest that any such simple causal relationship holds. Taxes form one part of a balance of factors, some of which may be beyond the control, of the local government. Because Thomas Lipscomb can be presumed to know this, one may only speculate about the interests served in his posting such misleading information. -- Stephen -- __________________________________________________________________ Stephen Downes ~ Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada http://www.downes.ca ~ stephen@private __________________________________________________________________ [Thomas is of course capable of defending himself, but I'd say obviously there are other factors beyond low taxes influencing investment: respect for property rights, a stable legal system, climate, sophistication of capital markets, and so on. A better example for Stephen to offer might be Estonia. It introduced a flat tax, started taking property rights seriously, reduced government intervention -- and saw its economy skyrocket, growing twice as fast as that of the U.S. --Declan] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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