catwho wrote:
If a dude owns a business that has 4 remote locations and 500 employees, that's 500 more cars driving on the roads to his businesses, to start. It was cheaper up front to build 45 minutes away from the nearest town than it was to purchase land 10 minutes away for the factory.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the personal profit of the dude at all though. Does the number of people driving to work on the roads change if he personally makes $500k/year from his business instead of just $50k/year? And isn't he employing those 500 people, who can now afford to drive cars, and who are paying for those roads via their vehicle registrations? And doesn't he pay property taxes for his businesses? And doesn't he (in most cases) have to chip in for part of the development of the area he's going to put his business in (one way or another)?
So if instead of 1 dude, what if there were 10, each owning a smaller business in the same area, each employing 50 people instead of 500, and each taking home $50k/year? The total infrastructure required is identical, right? The same total profits made are identical, right? Why the tax difference?
Can we please be honest and admit that the issue with higher taxes is exactly about punishing individuals for being "too rich" and not about anything else?
Also, we were talking about capital gains taxes anyway, not privately owned businesses. So I'm not sure how your analogy matches up.
Quote:
This is the case all over freaking highway 316. Businesses snatched up the land at dollars to the acre 20 years ago when they heard it was being upgraded to a state highway. Now the state is screwed because the traffic is so so bad on that road and no one wants to pay the billion dollars it would cost to upgrade it further to interstate, limited access class. So there's this one 5 mile stretch it takes you 20 minutes to get through because the traffic is so heavy. What lines that part of the road? Before the upgrade to state highway, it was just the airport and the jail. Today it's car dealerships, warehouses, giant business parks, etc.
Yeah. Sounds like it was an economic disaster for the area. All those jobs and businesses and tax revenue from economic activity which wasn't taking place before. You're right, that's terrible!
Quote:
Had the business owners built closer to the cities and towns in question and left 316 to the airport and the cows, it would take us a cool 45 minutes to drive from Athens to Atlanta. But because of the terrible planning on the part of the state and the miserly transportation tax from decades of Republican governorship, it takes closer to an hour and fifteen minutes. And dozens of people are killed every year on the road because it's unsafe.
So you'd rather the traffic and congestion occur right in the middle of the town instead of on the outskirts? So let's inconvenience everyone driving down the the store and doing errands throughout the day because gosh darn it, you need to drive to the next town over and there's more traffic on that road.
I'm not really seeing the problem there in the first place and I certainly don't see how this defends TLWs comment about how rich people somehow consume a greater share of public infrastructure costs.