Plan B Forum

Ignoring for a moment the silly reconstructors who claim that Barry's remark (in the title) was not referring to the Businesses owned by entrepreneurs, but rather the INFRASTRUCTURE upon which we all rely, his statement must be taken in the context of similar, earlier remarks by Elizabeth "Redskin" Warren on the same subject, to wit,

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory.”

And this is all bullshit. We are not indebted to anyone for the roads, the education, the police, the firefighters, and so on. WE PAID FOR THEM! And we continue to pay for them as long as we continue to breathe. And entrepreneurs in most cases pay for them TWICE! They pay taxes on their business revenues and profits, their property, their employees, the fuel they purchase, ad infinitum, and THEN they go home and pay another pile of taxes for their personal income, homes, etc.

Public education is a stunning example of the idiocy of Warren's and Barry's remarks. All property owners pay to educate our children, and not only when we have our children in school, but before and after our children are in school - if they ever do go to public schools - and regardless of whether we ever have children at all. And of course business owners generally pay many times what other private citizens pay because they are paying for them at home and at the office or factory (speaking, as Warren was about those who built factories). They are NOT indebted to anyone for the education of children in government schools; they paid for it many times over. And I won't even go into whether they got their money's worth, or they will have to OJT their publicly-educated employees on how to do math, or sampling, or how to write a cogent fucking sentence.

"...the rest of us paid for..." Bull. Fucking. Shit.

The outrage about these idiotic remarks is well-justified. They reflect a world-view that Government facilitates everything good in life and without the benevolent hand of government we would all be helpless, starving, diseased wretches. That was the undercurrent of 90% of the speeches at the DNC. "Look at what I was able to do with the Government's nurturing support."

Nauseating.

[quoteAnd entrepreneurs in most cases pay for them TWICE! They pay taxes on their business revenues and profits, their property, their employees, the fuel they purchase, ad infinitum, and THEN they go home and pay another pile of taxes for their personal income, homes, etc.
][/quote]

Come on--they only pay taxes on the business profits (not sure what revenues you claim are taxed) if they choose to incorporate and claim the benefits the law bestows on corporations; they could easily set up as an unincorporated company/partnership (and even claim limited liability) and pay the taxes on their income only once. If they value the corporate benefits more than the additional taxes they will pay as a corporation, then they can make the business decision and incorporate.

We are not indebted to anyone for the roads, the education, the police, the firefighters, and so on. WE PAID FOR THEM!

Please. Few, if any, of us pay enought taxes to fund a road; far less of us pay even enough to pay for the salary of a police officer or teacher. That's the funny thing about taxes--our payments are pooled for the common benefit. We are, indeed, indebted to each other for those benefits.

That was the undercurrent of 90% of the speeches at the DNC. "Look at what I was able to do with the Government's nurturing support

while I don't agree with that statement as to the "undercurrent" of the speeches, I do think it is true with regard to the fact that some of us get back far more in services than we Pay in taxes, and some far less. And businesses are generally on the far more side of that equation. Just ask the railroads whether they'd rather have their railbeds publicly unded and maintained (of course they didn't at the outset when they could get large free grants of land from the government to encourage building, but now they cry they cannot compete fairly with trucking which uses publicly funded roads).

On average, it costs over a million dollars per mile of highway. There's no way most of these businesses could have possibly paid, by themselves, enough to pave to the next county, let alone across the country.