Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Buffet and Stien miss the point on taxes

Both Warren Buffet and Ben Stien have advocated higher taxes on the rich lately. I suppose they see this as very humanitarian, to offer to pay more of your own, and lots of others income for your country. Enabling incompetence is not a virtuous endeavor. These gentlemen are only looking at cost and ignoring value.

The message that sends to government is that doing a lousy job will not slow down your growth. We don't want you to finance the growth of failure. If the government can actually balance budgets and is limited in size, and therefore scope, one might make the case for budget increases. That's how it works in the real world. You don't expand failing divisions. You don't promote people who don't actually advance toward a desired goal. You don't put fuel in a broken truck.

Downsize, clean house, start acting like you have some value as an employee of the biggest market force in the world, then we can talk about govt taking on more responsibility. That's many years down the road.

No comments: