Always nice when a Nevada GOPer acts like, well, a GOPer is supposed to act:

WASHINGTON -- Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., warned Thursday against Congress raising taxes this fall, saying the United States risks its competitiveness against Asian and European nations that are "racing" in the opposite direction to cut taxes.

"The corporate income tax rate in America is the second highest in the industrialized world," Ensign said in a Senate speech. "Rather than looking for ways to raise taxes, I believe this Congress should be looking for ways to make us more competitive by lowering taxes."

Ensign's message of low taxes, reduced spending and smaller government was not new for him. But he said he chose to speak on the topic as Congress begins to consider tax and spending bills for the fall.

The Nevada Republican joined the Senate Finance Committee this summer where new taxes are being debated both publicly and privately among senators in back rooms, he said.

The really strong part of Ensign's message is that not only should we not raise taxes, we should seek to cut them - even such high-tax nations like Germany are lowering their corporate tax rates and if we don't follow suit, we'll be at a competitive disadvantage. And this just brings up one of my pet peeves: taxing corporations at all.

Corporations, you see, don't pay taxes. Nope, not a penny. Oh, I know - if you head over to the Treasury Department, they'll give you down the penny how much money was collected in "corporate income taxes". A lot of money comes into the government labelled as "corporate income tax" and a lot of other taxes and fees which are allegedly applied only to corporations...but, trust me on this, the corporations didn't pay the taxes. You did. And I did. And your aunt Sally did - everyone paid those taxes. Those taxes were paid for with higher prices, lower wages, less jobs or some combination of these things. Once upon a time, outside the office I was working in, there was a bird which was aggressively defending its territory by vigorously pecking at an interloper...unfortunately, this interloper was a reflection of the bird, so he spent a large part of his day pecking himself...that is what taxing a corporation is like.

Taxing corporations is popular, of course - especially on the left. This is because leftists are, to a man and woman, economically illiterate. To them, a corporation is some fat cat CEO who sleeps on a pile of money - tax some of that away to feed starving children! What a corporation actually amounts to is a money-making enterprise...making, that is the operative word. It doesn't actually hold on to the money - the money made is used to pay workers, invest and, of course, provide dividends to stock holders. A corporation will keep some cash on hand, but that is just to meet expensese which cannot be met out of current revenues. When a corporation like Microsoft reports $10 billion in quarterly revenues, it doesn't mean that Bill Gates has $10 billion in cash tucked under his mattress.

It would be far better to not tax corporations at all - we'd all have lower prices, higher wages, more jobs, or a combination of the three. It would also, and more importantly, strike a blow against that class-warfarism the left has been pushing on us for more than a century now. High time we stopped believing, even a little, in the Marxist twaddle.

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Tracked on September 8, 2007 4:34 AM