As usual, the GOP seems to have lost contact with reality. From WaPo:
President Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, looked out from the stage at a sea of CEOs and top executives in the audience Tuesday for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting. As Cohn sat comfortably onstage, a Journal editor asked the crowd to raise their hands if their company plans to invest more if the tax reform bill passes.
Very few hands went up.
Cohn looked surprised. “Why aren’t the other hands up?” he said.
He laughed a little to lighten the mood, but it didn’t cause many more hands to rise. Maybe the CEOs were tired. Maybe they didn’t hear the question. It was a casual poll, but the lukewarm response seemed in tension with much of the public enthusiasm among corporations for a tax overhaul.
The president and his senior team have kept saying that the tax plan would unleash business investment in the United States — new factories, more equipment and more jobs. But, perhaps as the informal poll suggested, there are reasons to be doubtful that a great business investment boom would materialize.
This actually shouldn’t be surprising in light of this academic work that we talked about a while back concerning the lower-than-expected level of business investment occurring right now. If enough companies are not feeling the edge of the knife at their throats because they’ve become dominant, then why should they invest?
I suspect that taxation is not the horrible burden that many Republicans believe. Some companies use creative tax dodges, while others recognize it as simply the price of doing business – and perhaps a welcome price at that.
Smaller business owners will, of course, welcome the lower taxes – but the general lowering of taxes will generally not help competitive positions, because in most cases everyone gets the break.
If the President is serious about unleashing business investment, perhaps it’d make more sense to look into breaking up the big companies. Restore competition – and redundant jobs. Remember, monopolistic practices and giant corporations are antithetical to the American mythos.
