The Manhattan Institute’s Jim Manzi has written a great column lucidly explaining why the economic policies of the Democrats under Obama threaten entrepreneurship, the ultimate source of innovation, productivity enhancement, and economic growth. Here’s his conclusion:
Like the college students who stayed up late to hear Obama’s campaign speeches only to find his first significant action to be a stimulus program that will transfer about $1 trillion from them to the Baby Boomers, Silicon Valley Obama supporters may find themselves in an uncomfortable environment. A government-dominated economic era may not be an auspicious one in which to start companies that threaten big, incumbent corporations with lots of political clout.
The concept of “animal spirits” recognizes that not all economic decisions are made entirely with spreadsheets. Some people start companies because they’re driven by a dream that transcends rational economic calculation. But most successful entrepreneurs are pretty serious about comparing risks with opportunities. Higher tax burdens raise the price of entrepreneurship. When you raise the price of something, then, all else held equal, you usually get less of it. Given that something like 7 million people in the U.S. work in companies that are or were venture-backed, including a majority of the employees in high-growth sectors of the economy like computers and software, this is likely to matter a lot in the long run.
This is a good point, but let's take it a step further.
(1) What is our evidence that at current margins we need more entrepreneurship?
Of course on average there are positive spillovers from entrepreneurship, but it is unwise to confuse average effects with marginal effects.
The flip answer is “look at the unemployment rate!” but the problem here is a busted banking system. Lowering taxes on entrepreneurship is probably a poor fix for a busted banking system.
(2) Related to the above: If we do in fact need more entrepreneurship, is a lowered tax rate on startups the most efficient policy to increase such positive spillovers?
The answer could certainly be “yes” we need more entrepreneurship, and we need lower taxes on startups, but we gotta ask the question to get the answer.
Reagan, Bush I and Bush II are responsible for $9 trillion of America's current $10 trillion dollar debt.
Why squeal about what Obama is doing?
Like I said before, the government is effectively monopolizing venture capital for selective ventures.
If I, for instance came up with a luxury sedan five seater that somehow managed, at its weight, to still get 50 miles per gallon, or better yet 100, through some bizarre feat of fluid dynamics and combustion physics, yet did not even utilize hybrid technology, I would most likely be shut out of this hypothetical capital environment with only a prototype to show for it. These are politically/ideologically selected innovation proposals, and thus have nothing to do with consumer demand balanced with production feasibility. Case in point, it is possible, realistic, cost effective, to increase the gas mileage of cars while still utilizing the basic technology of the internal combustion engine. It is not politically correct to utilize this technology, no matter how efficiently we can do it, when all of our rhetorical capital has been spent telling people that continuing to use oil for anything is the moral equivalent of infanticide. That still doesn't change the fact that electric cars will be cost effective for mass consumer use when they're ready to be, not when it's politically expedient for Barack Obama and well past due for Ed Begley Jr.
Cool Cal is spot on! A hybrid sedan that gets 50 miles a gallon would have federal grants thrown at it by the usual politically correct police, while a diesel or gasoline-powered bus with 150 miles per gallon would be ignored.
To camp on the crux of Manzi's article, let's face it, new jobs come from (new/newer) small and medium sized companies. Propping up the old companies that can not compete and that offer mature products or serve mature markets and only show a profit when they lay people off just prolongs the death of those companies.
Cool Cal is spot on! A hybrid sedan that gets 50 miles a gallon would have federal grants thrown at it by the usual politically correct police, while a diesel or gasoline-powered bus with 150 miles per gallon would be ignored.
To camp on the crux of Manzi's article, let's face it, new jobs come from (new/newer) small and medium sized companies. Propping up the old companies that can not compete and that offer mature products or serve mature markets and only show a profit when they lay people off just prolongs the death of those companies.
If the highest virtue to be pursued by economic policy today was to create incentives entrepreneurs then I think the response is guilty-as-charged. But I think it's folly to assume that doing so would solve the problems which the U.S. currently faces in the short run.
And greater discretion in terms of which policy is precisely the bogeyman here would be appreciated. Raising marginal tax rates two years from now to where they were 10 years ago, not exactly an era bereft of innovation in the Valley, doesn't seem the likely culprit. Maybe the deduction scaling? Or is it just the undefined “government-run economy” that Cramer seems fond of setting up as a straw man.
Someone (preferably the GOP) please show me a policy which would both foster innovation and help us avoid an increase in unemployment beyond today's levels in the short run? Because without that second part, we're not going anywhere with it politically. Us living in a democracy and all.
This is a big week for conservatives to flog what worries them, even if their case makes only incidental contact with facts on the ground.
No law has passed or been proposed which would stifle entrepreneurs.
In fact it all collapses to those nonsense arguments we are so familiar with “marginal rate 34% nirvana, marginal rate 36% end of the world as we know it.” As always, a little world survey and comparative entrepreneurship puts lie to that (as does comparison to our own historic rates and rates of business formation.)
(What is it with conservatives and fear as a motivation?)
Complaining about the actions of past presidents does nothing.
Complaining about the actions of current presidents does marginally more nothing.
But Manzi is complaining about imaginary actions Obama may or may not take in the future.
Will's experiment in confirmation bias sure is dredging up some losers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Obamanomics will have far more of a chilling effect on the entrepreneurial spirit animating a company like Madoff Investment Securities LLC than it will on the entrepreneurial spirit animating a company like Apple Computers. If so, discouraging “entrepreneurship” (simpliciter) may be a net economic benefit.
Load of crap… entrepreneurs do for the sake of doing
“most successful entrepreneurs are pretty serious about comparing risks with opportunities” I would say that might be true of people who are already rich… not the entrepreneurs on their way… I know plenty of none of them EVER considered the tax implications…. if entrepreneurs were that boring, they would have been accountants instead
The simplest rebuttal is that any innovation people are unwilling to begin during an Obama administration, will be taken up by others; perhaps less effectively, but still taken up.
When more favorable market conditions come back, those willing to innovate earlier will have the advantage of a head start. If _anyone_ uses _any_ excuse to sit on their hands instead of innovate, given the finite number of years youthful entrepreneurial blood flows through the veins, they will be punished greatly for their lack of gumption.
“Working hard when market conditions suggest no chance of real success” – What innovators ever violated this rule?
[ An easier argument can be made that over-rewarding innovation in financial leverage instruments bled young & smart workers from other industries, to the detriment of innovation in those industries. ]
“Load of crap… entrepreneurs do for the sake of doing
“most successful entrepreneurs are pretty serious about comparing risks with opportunities” I would say that might be true of people who are already rich… not the entrepreneurs on their way… I know plenty of none of them EVER considered the tax implications…. if entrepreneurs were that boring, they would have been accountants instead”
You had me at “load of crap” — all I can is you are spot on — “entrepreneurs do for the sake of doing” — yes, they'll find a way.
“(What is it with conservatives and fear as a motivation?)” -odograph
I thought it was progressives that were telling everyone that the world will fall apart if we don't transfer $1 Trillion dollars from the taxpayers to their political allies? Was I mistaken?
Also, since when in Will a conservative?
Jayson asked me:“I thought it was progressives that were telling everyone that the world will fall apart if we don't transfer $1 Trillion dollars from the taxpayers to their political allies?”
Huh? The commonality between the Benranke/Paulson plan and the Bernanke/Geitner plan is much greater than the difference.
If you mean to distract the eye from a few trillion of bailout, to the the stimulus, that isn't even “progressive.” Not until you isolate the progressive planks within it – but that's the game isn't it? Another way to ignore the big picture and pretend the tail is the dog?
(I understand that Will is a liberalatiran but when I see a vibe echoing across the net as I do today, I'll do a grouping. The vibe is a panic about laws that are not actually there.)
Will–one of the biggest risks from leaving your job to start a company of your own is losing your health care (or else having to pay for your own individual policy). This is a risk that doesn't exist in any other industrialized country. Clearly, a national health care plan that affordably covered everybody would have significant entrpreneurship-boosting qualities, wouldn't you agree?
Dan, do you realize how much the US healthcare industry subsidizes the rest of the world? Not just in terms of drugs (nearly every single one developed in the US), but medical devices on down the line.
If you want crappier healthcare for the US and crappier healthcare for the rest of the world, then wave your magic wand and nationalize it. I can’t wait to see healthcare run by the TSA.
I'll apologize in advance for rambling, but…
I think you start to see a lot of stuff like this post because economists and political types who don't know a damn thing about technology or engineering want to use the appeal of consumer technology to peddle their wares, and the people who do understand often don't have the interest, communication skills, or political heft to be heard. It's either poorly thought out, disingenuous, or both.
There's one part that has become a meme that desperately needs to be fought. I'm so sick of hearing that venture capital and entrepreneurship are the ultimate source of innovation. Maybe that's true for shipping or banking or whatever, but for technology it's unadulterated bunk. Entrepreneurs of the type mentioned come in and do the last two steps of bringing an idea to market after 95% of the work has been done by somebody in a huge corporate lab like HP or (once upon a time) bell labs, or nowadays, dare I say it, government funded university labs. Years and years of basic research went on to make all the technologies that go into an iPhone possible, and yet when apple does a couple of years of spit shine and integration of those technologies into a device they are to be thought of as having done all of the innovation? That seems like a pretty major misunderstanding and an important one, since it would lead you to bolster the part of the technology pipeline that requires the least help.
We've got a fantastically successful system for doing the grunt work of innovation that involves, among other things finding the best researchers from all over the world, giving them the resources to explore, and making sure that the results are freely shared as widely as possible. And we do it this way for a very good reason. When it comes to technology good practices for running a business and doing R&D can be basically antithetical. Private research is a lousy model because it is very inefficient. When you don't share results (and business incentive dictate that you don't), work must be duplicated over and over again. The big point here is that the line between basic research and profit is too long for business to be comfortable with, but progress is extremely beneficial to society, so we've got a totally different system whereby the government accepts the risk of the blue sky stuff and the private sector gets in exchange for the taxes a firehose of ideas and technology that they can easily turn in to products. If it's innovation you're after, support the firehose.
With promising technologies in the open the last step will take care of itself unless explicitly prevented by law or anti-competitive practices, so I'm deeply suspicious of the idea that tax rates are very high on the list of impediments to start-ups bringing disruptive technologies to the market. The tax breaks their competitors get may be another matter. So are the anti-competitive practices of many established companies. You can't simultaneously support established businesses and technologies and encourage innovation at the same time, so if you're really concerned with helping the silicon valley guys out, how about the following:
-ensure that basic research results are public knowledge, and resist efforts to patent basic technologies
-enforce or strenuously encourage standards that facilitate interoperability. Companies with large market share hate this, but start ups love it, because it gives consumers flexibility.
-if you're a real radical, don't let one or two companies dominate an entire business in the first place, in which case #2 becomes a necessity and the market will see to it on its own.
More broadly, I don't understand how we can look back at how (just to keep it in the last 100 years) work in basic science like quantum mechanics led to the invention of the transistor which is instigating the most rapid reconfiguration of society and the economy in human history and think that the process of bringing specific products to market deserves more policy attention than basic science, or that anything short of extreme tax policies could play a significant role either way. We're at a point in history where the breakthroughs are so huge that they're inevitably radically transformative, and unstoppably so. The idea that taxes figure into it in the long run is actually laughable when you think about it. Look at the open source movement, linux in particular. People are moved and empowered enough by their new found capacities to take on and even outshine our most successful companies, and they're doing it all essentially for free. How does tax policy look in the face of that. But we're not even started yet. Just watch the next ten years of synthetic biology…
Don't think so. Madoff and Stanford were big Democrats. If anything else, Obamanomics will encourage more Democrat theft since they will be protected by their crooked buddies in Congress and the White House. Just look at Harold Raines and the current votes on PMA.
Obama for 2009 has a deficit 4 times (that's 400% larger) than the largest yearly deficit generated under Bush II.
There is a reason to 'squeal' about Obama. So far he is 4 times worse than Bush II.
Completely not true. I know plenty of people who decided not to start small businesses because of the paperwork, tax issues, and other government complications.
Why bother working and starting a business at all when you can just sit back and get free Obama money?
They will be punished? hahahahahaha!
Nope, they will get checks from Obama. As a renter, I just love his new plan to give free money to people with $700,000 mortgages. And by 'love' I mean hate, detest, and other words appropriate to describe Obama the scum.
Yup, as Obama whips harder, they will just say 'Yes massah!'
The TARP money gets charged to Bush, uknow, so does the bank and insurance bailout money.
Nice try, though.
The 2009 deficit is projected at $1.75 trillion. 4 times higher than any year under Bush II.
Count, don't count whatever you want. That fact still stands.
I suggest if you start a business under the Obama administration that you first hire lots of hookers. Make sure to hire female and male hookers so you can take care of all the various tastes of Congress and the White House. Lots of whoring (I mean 'lobbying') to get government cash and favors.
“The vast majority of Americans, 84%, think the current economic conditions were inherited and not caused by President Barack Obama, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll to be released today.”
Tough news for the shills of the wealthy, I know.
Try harder, unknow, you may just convince a few simpletons to blame Obama for our current economic crisis yet.
Thanks everybody for the detailed comments. a few quick reactions
Alphie:
I've written a lot in prior posts about the fact that GWB also ran up huge deficits, and for no justifiable reasons. Deficit spending is now gooing to ~10% of gdp, whihc is more than it's been since 1945. there is an argument for this, on balance, being a good idea. One drawback, whihc i don;t think is obvious to everybody is that it is likely to reduce company formation c.p. That was the point of the article.
Ododgraph:
Lots of laws have been passed or submitted that will raise capital gians, ordinary and uneraned income rates, which are the specific mechanisms discusse din the article. I used Obama's published proposals as the basis for the quantitative analysis in the piece.
Kim:
“Load of crap… entrepreneurs do for the sake of doing”
I've started a couple of companies, and I carefully considered risk vs. financial returns. I sit on the Boards f two others, and this is true for the CEO / Founders of those companies as well.
manuelg:
“The simplest rebuttal is that any innovation people are unwilling to begin during an Obama administration, will be taken up by others; perhaps less effectively, but still taken up.”
Maybe, but unless you think that company founders perform no useful economic function, if you have less of it, you will have less innovation.
Chris:
“I think you start to see a lot of stuff like this post because economists and political types who don't know a damn thing about technology or engineering want to use the appeal of consumer technology to peddle their wares, and the people who do understand often don't have the interest, communication skills, or political heft to be heard. It's either poorly thought out, disingenuous, or both.”
I'm a scientist-turned-entrepreneur, and not a “political type”.
“I'm so sick of hearing that venture capital and entrepreneurship are the ultimate source of innovation. Maybe that's true for shipping or banking or whatever, but for technology it's unadulterated bunk. Entrepreneurs of the type mentioned come in and do the last two steps of bringing an idea to market after 95% of the work has been done by somebody in a huge corporate lab like HP or (once upon a time) bell labs, or nowadays, dare I say it, government funded university labs.”
I actually worked at Bell Labs many years ago. for some companies, there is a lot of truth to what you say, and for others, not so much (at loeast in my experience).
The people who created Google, Facebook, and the iPhone did not do it for free. Just because they weren't being paid by someone else, doesn't mean there weren't costs involved. They took risks and faced the opportunity costs associated with developing new technologies and services for which there was no pre-existing market. It is my understanding that they have since become quite wealthy. I do not believe the open-source community would be as vigorous as it is if the participants truly harbored no hope of ever being able to use their developing skills to personal profit.
Why do the opinions of “84%” of americans mean anything?
Try quoting an expert next time, and not a bunch of, well, idiots.
So you are debating the claim that increasing the cost of innovation lowers the amount of innovation?
It seems to take a particular wave of stupidity on my part to de-lurk in these conversations because they're usually over by the time I figure out what I'm trying to say. Jumping in halfway through a thought has ugly consequences. I think there is some way to extract a bit of a point from the above, and maybe to argue with you a little bit on here, but you're mostly. And my face is awfully red…
Obama clearly inherited the financial crisis. However, Geithner has been less than convincing, and the stimulus got coopted by Congress. I'd say there's a good chance the crisis has deepened since Obama took office. And don't cite an opinion poll: current popular opinion has little bearing on whether or not policies are effective in the long run.
“Shills for the wealthy,” alphie? Why so agitated? Is Obama disappointing you so far?
I think loosening intellectual property laws might accomplish your goals (1) and (2), without requiring massive subsidies to public research. The question is, how much incentive is there to invest in innovation without IP rights? I'm sure there's some empirical research out there, but I wouldn't know where to look and have nowhere near the time to find out.
Yeah, I feel like I owe you an apology. I committed two irritating conversational crimes earlier. I let a the beginning of a defensible thought turn into a half-baked rant that went way off the rails. Worse, I was basically reacting to something that has been nagging at me in unrelated conversations recently, and not to what you actually said. A few seconds of google and (cringe) actually reading the OP makes it clear that you are not the opponent I was after. That was pretty sloppy.
Fortunately for me, while the internet enables one to stick his foot in his mouth in front of a large audience, it cannot yet transmit rotten fruits and vegetables…
I hadn't realized crooked Democrats respond differently to incentives than crooked Republicans.
Jim, here's the number of new corporations formed in New York state back to 1984:
1984 – 69,000
1985 – 72,000
1986 – 77,000
1987 – 76,000
1988 – 78,000
1989 – 73,000
1990 – 66,000
1991 – 64,000
1992 – 68,000
1993 – 70,000
1994 – 71,000
1995 – 72,000
1996 – 74,000
1997 – 74,000
1998 – 73,000
1999 – 75,000
2000 – 76,000
2001 – 73,000
2002 – 78,000
2003 – 78,000
2004 – 79,000
2005 – 77,000
2006 – 76,000
2007 – 74,000
Maybe someone who is an expert in tax rates over those years can support your theory, but to my untrianed eye, the chart looks pretty flat despite some pretty big swings in tax rates.
I'm just really starting to learn about intellectual property laws, but I haven't run across any good empirical research. My impression so far is that the amount of academic attention paid IP hasn't kept up with its increasing importance. As a consequence, it seems like there's a lot of philosophical legwork that still needs to be done before semi-coherent laws can be drawn up. The whole debate seems pretty plagued with vagueness and confusion. On the other hand, the mudiness may just be coming from me.
In general though, I'll defend massive subsidies to public research. Basic research pays enormous dividends in the long run, but it often doesn't really make a lot of sense for individual companies to take so long a view when there's no obvious prospect of refining product or bringing a new one to market.
Are those New York corporations? What about other states, in particular, Delaware?
I am a technologist/entrepreneur who is currently working very hard at getting some very worthy technology companies funded. There are plenty of ideas out there, there are many good technologies that come out of these ideas, and a few of these technologies are ready to be turned into real businesses. There seems to be no shortage of the entrepreneurial spirit however there is a shortage of cash to help good opportunities expand. High Net Wealth Individuals may have a lot of assets, but convincing them to turn their current assets into cash is tough. Why? Because their current assets may in fact be underwater and they need to be convinced to take a loss and take a chance on something new. Worse, they may not have any buyers for their current assets at all (e.g., like in the case of real estate).
It seems that the best result of any “stimulus plan” is to keep HNWIs from completely freaking out long enough for them to figure out that they have indeed lost a lot of money, then to get over it, then figure out they need to take what they got and in some ways start all over again.
“Wake up! There is work to do!”
Thanks for the question. I think the natural crude comparison that would relate directly to my contention would be the comparison between gov't consumption of resources in a year (taxes plus expectation of future taxes) as compared to venture capital funding commitments in that year. If you look at gov't spending as a % of GDP from here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_cen…
and compare it to VC capital commitments from here: http://www.nvca.org/pdf/NVCAYearbook2008.pdf
then you have the data to do this for the period 1980 – 2007. There is a negative correlation with R2 of .28. That is, it is entirely consistent with my argument.
Now, to be clear, I only did this because you asked. There is no strong argument for causality in such a comparison, IMHO.
LOL…don't worry about it
Ben,
Does it matter which state my data comes from? Aren't we talking about the effect of federal government spending on the number of businesses incorporated?
Jim,
I combined your data into a table showing U.S. government spending as a percent of GDP and the amount of venture capital raised in billions of dollars by year back to 1980…and I can't see any correlation between the two:
1980 – 33.7% $2.0
1981 – 33.6% $1.5
1982 – 36.3% $1.7
1983 – 36.2% $3.9
1984 – 34.4% $3.0
1985 – 35.5% $4.0
1986 – 35.7% $3.8
1987 – 35.1% $4.4
1988 – 34.7% $4.4
1989 – 32.7% $4.9
1990 – 36.3% $3.3
1991 – 37.5% $2.0
1992 – 37.1% $5.3
1993 – 36.4% $4.1
1994 – 35.5% $8.9
1995 – 35.6% $9.9
1996 – 34.8% $11.8
1997 – 33.9% $19.7
1998 – 33.4% $29.9
1999 – 33.0% $56.4
2000 – 33.0% $105.2
2001 – 33.9% $38.8
2002 – 35.3% $9.5
2003 – 35.9% $11.6
2004 – 35.3% $19.8
2005 – 35.4% $28.3
2006 – 35.7% $31.9
2007 – 35.5% $39.7
Looks to me that the amount of venture capital raised in a given year is a function of how well stocks are doing.
To me: “Lots of laws have been passed or submitted that will raise capital gians, ordinary and uneraned income rates, which are the specific mechanisms discusse din the article. I used Obama's published proposals as the basis for the quantitative analysis in the piece.”
Thanks for the reply, but please pause to really consider this: What is the larger thing hanging over our financial heads right now, to be paid with future taxes, spending or bailouts?
I give Dan Miller (health insurance) and Nicole Tedesco (global loss of wealth) the big “ding ding ding” awards for getting it.
The crazy COBRA scheme for insurance. $25 trillion lost from global equity markets. Yeah, let's pretend the worst thing for entrepreneurs in 2009 are the tax laws not passed yet.
Odograph:
I think if you calculate the correlation between those the two vectors, in your comment, you will find it to be -0.53, i.e., negative slope with an R2 of .28, as per my comment.
If you calculate the correlation between these two vectors, I think you will find it to be -0.53, i.e., a neagtive slope with R2 of 0.28, as per my comment.
Manzi's argument is interesting, but his evidence isn't even anecdotal. It might be nice to have empirical studies of new businesses in various fields — also nice would be an analysis of why those new businesses weren't simply created within existing companies.
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The peak year is 2000. Hmmm. What else happened in 2000?
A tech investment bubble at a rate of 33% seems to have quite exceeded the investment made in 1989, in a different market environment, but at a lower tax rate.
IOW, I don't see this as a driving correlation
Actually, our real worry might be that the rising venture capital market tracked not just the tech bubble, but the wider credit bubble, and that is the reason for the 95 to 07 explosion.
As per my comment:
“Now, to be clear, I only did this because you asked. There is no strong argument for causality in such a comparison, IMHO.”
Further, as per the original artile, in one of the two paragraphs quoted by will in the post:
“The concept of “animal spirits” recognizes that not all economic decisions are made entirely with spreadsheets. Some people start companies because they’re driven by a dream that transcends rational economic calculation. But most successful entrepreneurs are pretty serious about comparing risks with opportunities. Higher tax burdens raise the price of entrepreneurship. When you raise the price of something, then, all else held equal, you usually get less of it”
I didn't argue that “we must have new start-ups” or that “this is the only way to get innovation” or whatever.
I argued that if you lower the expected payoff fo an activity, then “all else held equal, you usually get less of it.”
Are you really disputing that?
A financial crisis that he and his buddy democrats created. They along with fellow-traveler republicans are to blame for the housing bubble which is the source of the mess.
See a 1999 NYT article for more info:
http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2009/02/oka_…
And as for polls, 80% of Americans are morons and 90% of the rest of the world are morons.
I agree with that. If you make innovation harder, you will get less of it.
The grass is also green (though democrats are trying to make it all brown).
My intention was to dispute only (a) that the tradeoffs implied by your examples are necessarily typical (they may well be, but I can't tell from what you wrote), and also (b) that the interests of the major corporations would be better served if there were no startups (which the attitude you allude to in your article implies, I thought).
I also think Nicole Tedesco has a point, though I probably wouldn't put it the same way she does.
Actually I didn't see this as what I asked. When I talked about “comparative entrepreneurship” I was thinking about something more akin to “business starts.”
But regardless as I say the data show on venture funds show something more related to finance markets.
Not to put this on you specifically Jim, but I think the failures placed upon economics of late, with respect to black swans and values at risk, revolve about “all else held equal” being rare on the ground.
Things change, and it is very hard to pull one thread (like marginal rate) from the mix and say that it mattered at a particular point of time. That's not to say that any marginal rate is as good as another … but certainly when we are talking about a percent or two in practice it is no big deal.
Well, we sure agree on that. I've probably written a book's worth of material on this point. It's why I was so cautious about making a prediction other than “but for” this change, we would see less company formation, and didn;t even try to quantify this difference.
I think we're going to end up at way more than a percent or two of difference, btw.
Best,
Jim
Just that dems are even more crooked than repubs. So expect more crooked nonsense (Burris, Blago, Barney, etc.)
I see.
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Business starts should probably adjusted for population.
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This is a flat out misrepresentation. Of course debt rose under Reagan, and you can argue we didn't need to rebuild the military and we should have been fine with detante, but the fact is, that while GWB increased the size of government 60%, there was also an increase in revenue to gov't thanks to tax cuts. However, Obama has increased government 3x's already over GWB's pace, while revenue is dropping in a recession, thereby creating more debt than all president's combined.
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-276675
This is a flat out misrepresentation. Of course debt rose under Reagan, and you can argue we didn't need to rebuild the military and we should have been fine with detante, but the fact is, that while GWB increased the size of government 60%, there was also an increase in revenue to gov't thanks to tax cuts. However, Obama has increased government 3x's already over GWB's pace, while revenue is dropping in a recession, thereby creating more debt than all president's combined.
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-276675