This Just Isn’t The Way To Make An Economic Argument
DEAR Lord this is piffle:
This year, state government subsidies to corporations, partnerships, and other businesses in New York state alone will total $1.7 billion, triple the giveaways in 2005, according to the new study. That’s $235 taken from the average Empire State household this year and redistributed to business owners on the theory that redistribution will create jobs.
During those years, the number of jobs in New York declined, the state’s official jobs data website shows. The total number of New Yorkers employed in 2012 was down 175,000, or 2 percent, compared with 2005.
This is used to show that tax incentives to companies does not provide jobs. For, as you can see, we’ve been providing more subsidies but there are fewer jobs!
And this was done by a reporter who actually has a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on tax issues.
But before we leap to that conclusion we’d like to think of other things that might be happening as well. For example, there’s a long running, been going on for half a century now, movement of people out of the North of the US to the warmer places in the South. Something to do with the invention of air conditioning I’m told. And also the population as a whole has been ageing: there’s more people retired and out of the workforce than there ever has been in history.
And wasn’t there something else as well? I’m sure there was you know. Something about a financial crash that led to the worst recession since the Great Depression? With soaring unemployment to boot wasn’t there?
And, umm, I’m actually pretty sure that the unemployment rate today is, for all people and right across the US, 2 percentage points higher than it was in 2005.
Oh well, as they say, never believe what you’re told in the newspapers. And one reason for that is that the people writing them are prone to leaping to entirely erroneous conclusions.
Posted: 11th, December 2013 | In: Money, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
