Chart a new course
Pittsburgh Tribune Review Editorial
The next time Gov. Ed Rendell and his merry band of government propagandists start talking about how great their economic initiatives have left Pennsylvania’s economy, loudly clear your throat, thrust your hand into the air and shout, “Excuse me!”
The latest point of order comes from The Commonwealth Foundation, which properly notes the deleterious effects of high taxes on economic growth. To wit:
- Pennsylvania’s combined federal and state corporate income tax rate is higher than that of any other industrialized nation in the world and trails only Iowa’s top rate.
- At 41.5 percent (adjusting for federal deduction of state taxes), the tax rate for Pennsylvania’s corporations is about 2 percentage points higher than Japan’s, 7 percentage points higher than France’s and 13.5 percentage points higher than Norway’s and Sweden’s.
The Harrisburg think tank says that has led to a loss of 200,000 manufacturing jobs in the Keystone State since 2000.
The evidence is clear nationwide that lowering corporate taxes for all spurs the kind of economic growth that government tax-and-spend policies never have and never will. Rendell-o-nomics has been a “progressive” failure easily predicted.
It’s a no-brainer — cut taxes and cut spending and blossoms will bloom all across the commonwealth. A failure to change course now is nothing less than a dereliction of duty.
