Letter: Taxes and jobs

Politicians and pundits often tell us that if we raise taxes, we will kill business growth and plunge into a new depression. Is that so? If you look for proof that this works, you will discover that only one study was ever conducted, and it was inconclusive.
In reality, businesses grow and hire more workers when the demand for their products increases, not just because they have more cash sitting in the bank. Why make more stuff if nobody is going to buy it? Corporations want all those tax loopholes and subsidies so that they can pay out profits to shareholders. But dumping money into business profits does not lead to job growth or economic growth — it doesn’t “trickle down.”
Look at tax tables going back a century, and you will see that income taxes are now the lowest they have been since before World War II. If ultra-low taxes were a formula for job growth, the economy would be jumping. The average person might not have a sense of the shrinking tax level, because the lion’s share of the benefits have gone to the very rich, not the rest of us. Just to look at one major tax cut: We were sold on Proposition 13 with stories of old ladies driven from their homes by skyrocketing taxes. We agreed that the elderly should be able to keep their homes, so we voted to limit the amount property taxes could increase from one year to the next. We didn’t realize we were protecting rich corporations, as well — at least, most of us didn’t. Rich individuals and corporations are not elderly people on fixed incomes, and our schools and police should not be reduced to third-world funding levels to protect their wealth.
The funding crisis in the California government is truly unnecessary and artificial. We have the wealth in this state to support first-class public education, health care, policing and infrastructure. Strengthening the public sector will not kill jobs; instead, it will attract business, because strong infrastructure helps business function smoothly. We don’t want an economy and an infrastructure that’s only suited to sweatshop labor. We need to rededicate ourselves to creating the world-class education system and infrastructure that would support innovation and job creation. And to get there, we will have to tax more fairly, and at a level closer to what we paid in the 1970s. Some companies and individuals need to start paying their dues for the functioning infrastructure we all need.
Becky Roberts, Ben Lomond