Rubio’s explanation for voting against the fiscal-cliff deal reflects a firm conservative posture that leaves little room for a potential GOP rival to outflank him. “Thousands of small businesses, not just the wealthy, will now be forced to decide how they'll pay this new tax, and, chances are, they'll do it by firing employees, cutting back their hours and benefits, or postponing the new hire they were looking to make,” Rubio said in a written statement. “And to make matters worse, it does nothing to bring our dangerous debt under control.”I guess I would expect them to pay the new tax from the profits they are getting taxed on. In what world do small businessmen make over $400,000 a year in profit, and because their taxes will go up by a few percent they decide they should fire employees? Only in the world of fucking morons. Why would somebody in a very profitable business reduce their business capacity to save a few dollars in taxes? Instead, if they wanted to reduce the amount of taxes they make, I would guess they would use some of that profit to bring on new employees or invest in new software or equipment or something, and if they didn't think they needed the additional capacity, maybe they would better reward the employees who earned them that money (or give money to a fucking charity). But Marco Rubio, who as far as I know has "never had to meet a payroll" or hold a job that wasn't a political position thinks that businessmen would fire workers because they have to pay more in taxes. Thank God he hasn't run a business, or he'd have made George W. Bush look like a titan of industry. This is another example of a Republican politician which I can't decide whether he is this dumb, or he is smart enough to know better and just says things like this to manipulate the base. Like Jim Jordan, I am guessing Rubio is the former, because anyone with a shred of pride wouldn't want to say something like this which any person who runs a business would immediately recognize as idiotic.
For some reason (ok, I have an idea why), conservative economists love to hype "rational expectations," with the explanation that government spending doesn't stimulate the economy because people realize that if the government is running deficits, they will eventually have to raise taxes, so those folks will save to pay the taxes they know are going to come later, thus decreasing economic activity now, cancelling out the stimulus effect of the government spending. This is preposterous. The number of people who are going to do this is so tiny as to be insubstantial. If that were the case, we wouldn't have a use for Social Security, because everybody would have tucked their money away in their retirement accounts. Marco Rubio's explanation of small businesses' reactions to new taxes is the perfect example of peoples' irrationality when it comes to taxes. Like efficient market theory, rational expectations, especially when it comes to taxes, is a textbook example of academic cluelessness. Anybody who thinks that the vast majority of people can be counted on to do whatever is in their own rational self-interest hasn't ever been around very many actual people (or been able to figure out why rural people overwhelmingly vote Republican). We can pretty much expect that people will act irrationally. At least if they run their businesses like Marco Rubio thinks they would. Or if they would ever consider voting for him for President of the United States.
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