Unleash the Ivory Knights, Republican Plan Part 1

Republican Party Plan for America: " Our Plan to End The Uncertainty and Create Incentives for Job Growth: If we’ve learned anything during the recession, it’s that we cannot tax and spend our way to prosperity.The best way to get people working again is to rein in the growth of government and end the uncertainty facing small businesses.By addressing both issues, our plan revives free enterprise and moves America away from a debt-driven economy."


Like the rest of this document, this platform, this neo-contract-with-America, it is brimming with lofty rhetoric but almost devoid of any concrete solutions. Eight pages into the document, and we are presented with the first presuppositions of action being put forward by a presumably victorious party. Here is the unwieldy named 'Plan to End the Uncertainty and Create Incentives for Job Growth', and your humble blog warrior's analysis. 


• Permanently Stop All Job-Killing Tax Hikes:We will help the economy by permanently stopping all tax increases, currently scheduled to take effect January 1, 2011.That means protecting middle-class families, seniors worried about their retirement, and the entrepreneurs and family-owned small businesses on which we depend to create jobs in America.


Is it really to much trouble to push for tax cuts? To go into a political battle with the objective of merely yelling 'STOP' at the top of the assembly's lungs is madness, or apathy resigned to defeat. Spending cuts followed by tax cuts is the recipe for economic growth, not the neo-Keynesian approach of maintaining taxes whilst increasing spending. 
Realistically speaking, this boils down to maintaining the Bush tax cuts. It would be more appropriate to make more tax cuts, and with that mindset, a compromise solution of maintaining the tax rate can be reached. This is little more then the absurd proposition that the current tax rates are low enough to allow economic growth to occur, which is clearly untrue. Maintaining the status quo is a miserable argument, and ought to be disbanded by any party serious about making things right in the country. Perhaps I err in assuming the national GOP leadership seeks to make things more free for the American people. 




• Give Small Businesses a Tax Deduction:We will allow small business owners to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their business income.This will provide entrepreneurs with a much-needed infusion of capital for investment and new hiring


Tax cuts are proposed, and how marvelously specific this is. 20% of business income is a meaningless token political phrase, designed to keep people enticed but with very limited practical implications. 
The next logical question to ask of the Republican party is this: Why stop only at small businesses? When I purchase goods and services from any establishment of commerce, I pay the taxes they owe the government. So do the world a favor and lower taxes on all businesses, and in turn, lower my taxes and spending rate. The hypocrisy of this is disenchanting.n 


• Rein In the Red Tape Factory in Washington, DC:Excessive federal regulation is a de facto tax on employers and consumers that stifles job creation, hampers innovation and postpones investment in the economy.When the game is always changing, small businesses cannot properly plan for the future.To provide stability, we will require congressional approval of any new federal regulation that has an annual cost to our economy of $100 million or more.This is the threshold at which the government deems a regulation “economically significant.”If a regulation is so “significant” and costly that it may harm job creation, Congress should vote on it first.


The solution posed here is worthless by all measures except that of electoral garnish. To cut the obscenity of the Federal bureaucracy we shrug against, eliminate the devastating Federal intervention into Health care, Agriculture, Energy, Education, Employment, and light bulbs! Real solutions lie not in another layer of mystifying government processes, but in eliminating the very processes that have caused these economic ailments. 


• Repeal Job-Killing Small Business Mandates:One of the most controversial mandates of the Democrats’ government takeover of health care requires small businesses to report to the Internal Revenue Service any purchases that run more than $600.This 1099 reporting mandate is so overbearing that the IRS ombudsman has determined that the agency is ill-equipped to handle all the resulting paperwork..We will repeal this job-killing small business mandate.


I concur, this, in and of itself, is a very fine objective. 




Additional analysis to come later.