Obama Sends $3.7 Trillion Budget to Congress

[Sea Demon]

Originally Posted by mookiemookie

Fine. Go pull John Williams' Shadow Stats unemployment data and plot it against tax rates. My point still stands and you're still wrong.

Iit sounds like YOU don't understand the labor measures of unemployment. You know about U6 unemployment and the birth/death adjustment ratio. Bully for you. But don't presume to lecture me on it - I get paid to deal with this stuff. It boils down to: you will not be vindicated by the fact that the U3 data understates unemployment - you will still be completely wrong, but by magnitude of "a lot" vs "a whole lot". Inverse to no correlation is still inverse to no correlation, regardless of the underlying data points!

Tax rates have no bearing on employment. You have not and will not disprove that. Partisan narratives don't trump hard data.

Yet nothing is proven with the graphs you provide as "evidence". I actually took the time to read some of what this guy (John Williams)talks about. If you read carefully, he is not concluding what you read into it. Or at least I haven't seen this conclusion because of what is left out of the scene. One thing you ignore(willfully?) is that not all taxes are equal, nor are they the same across all states. And there are various taxes that some states don't even apply. This changes the whole aspect of what you're trying to prove with those graphs.

State taxation, property taxes in various localities, State income and state corporate taxes all affect businesses differently. Plus the graphs you show don't actually show how it may take 3...sometimes 4 quarters before businesses makes adjustments relative to things that affect their expenses such as taxes. Businesses often make adjustments prior to changing their workforce numbers. Sometimes they don't.

The company I work for is a classic example of what happens when taxes increase or remain high. Many businesses confirm it by leaving the high tax state of California. My company's HQ lease was excessively high...due in large part to the landlords property tax situation. Local and state governments in California demand extremely large shares of the pie. That was a known. And so paying the lease was a huge expense. One factor in determining cost of rent or lease is tax. That's also a given. Not too hard to see or understand.

Another factor is the fact that the sales tax on every purchase in California is 8.75% tax on every purchase made. That makes every subcontract, or goods and service provided within the state excessively expensive due to high taxes. this affeects the bottom line. Ultimately, these 2 taxes alone increased our operating costs to a point where an adjustment had to be made. And it was. The job losses could have been higher, yet our company laid off 80 here in California, streamlined the efficiency in various admin areas in the last 6 months, and rehired 53 in another state. A net loss of only 27 jobs(53 gained in low tax state), yet 80 California (high tax state job losses). That directly affected employment in both states yet the ratio is low.

I can even correlate that to some degree in your graph, yet it's splitting hairs. Of course I couldn't factor in the quarterly business cycles or balance sheet ratios into those graphs. And because of that...they are worthless to try to conclude what you're seeking to conclude.

The big question is, why do you think places like Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana (lower tax states)are seeing business gains while California (Big Dem/high tax)businesses have been downsizing or leaving? The big factors are usually over-regulation and costs associated with them, including taxes. Taxes (and all other expenses)absolutely correlate to employment or business adjustments. And I just showed you how. It's actually quite intuitive to most people that capital being seized by government, means less resources to grow business or sustain employment. Because of what your graphs don't show, they don't disprove anything.