Marketplace of Ideas Blog

I had two immediate thoughts after Tuesday’s first Wisconsin Jobs Now roundtable in Green Bay:

(1) The problems Northeast Wisconsin business people brought up are new chapters in an old book, which doesn’t make them less valid.

(2) The people who really needed to hear the travails of Northeast Wisconsin business people weren’t in the room — legislative Democrats, who control both houses of the Legislature.

One could not have created a more anti-business legislative package than Gov. James Doyle’s $2.4 billion in tax increases, half of which were pointed directly at businesses or the “rich,” short of government’s taking over every business in the state.

One particularly vexed about raising taxes in a recession (which would include a lot of speakers Tuesday) could ask whether Doyle and legislative Democrats really hate business, or whether they just see business as a convenient funding source. (The latter was the Clinton-era prevailing attitude toward business.)

“I don’t think they’re hostile; I would hope they’re not,” said Rep. John Nygren (R–Marinette). “The issue is that Republicans tend to be pro-business; a lot of us came from the business community.”

One Republican who came from the business community is freshman Sen. Randy Hopper (R–Fond du Lac), who called himself “insulted when I’m lectured on the Senate floor by career politicians who have never created a job.”

Hopper also has been told after complaints about Republicans being given zero opportunity for input in the budget repair bill — the bill that was handed to legislators at 4 p.m. one day and voted on at 11 a.m. the next day — “You had your way; now it’s our turn.” (Which is what one would expect one four-year-old to say to another on the playground.) Hopper also has heard Democrats say that “government is the only way out of this,” and he witnessed a legislative Democrat say to a group of business people that the current economy was their fault.

“I don’t know where business people fit in the scheme of things,” said Cap Wulf of Wulf Brothers in Sturgeon Bay, and his confusion is perfectly justified. “I feel like an indentured servant. … As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want government to do anything for me — I want government to get out of the way.”

What a quaint attitude in the era of bailouts. Actually, that attitude is growing, as demonstrated by the crowds at Saturday’s Green Bay Tea Party and Americans for Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit in Milwaukee.

One thing Hopper said stood out: “We’ve got to educate all the people who work for us about how this affects them.” As one participant pointed out, a minimum wage increase means he will be cutting employment. There is something seriously wrong when a company is cutting personnel not because it doesn’t have enough business, but because the government restricts what it can charge for its services. (Clearly the term “profit margin” is a foreign concept not only to many legislators, but to many Madison bureaucrats.)

One of the speakers suggested creating a statewide public relations campaign against the corporate income tax. That’s a good idea. Not enough people realize that businesses don’t pay taxes; their customers do in the cost of everything we buy. When we have in Wisconsin one of the highest combined maximum federal and state tax rates on business in the entire world (according to KPMG International), something is seriously wrong with this state. I’d also like to see those opposed to cutting taxes explain their rationale, seeing as how President Obama included tax cuts of sorts in his economic recovery plan.

This could all be dismissed as partisan complaining by last November’s losers. Except that the business people in the room Tuesday all employ people; all sell products and services to their customers, including other businesses; all make contributions of time and money to their communities; and all pay really high taxes to pay for our high-priced government services. They are the people, not our elected officials, who will ultimately lead us to economic recovery. And how does state government and our elected officials treat them? With high and increasing taxes, increasing and increasingly burdensome regulations, laws and regulations that appear to have not been thought out at all, and the general attitude that economic activity generators don’t matter because of the most recent election results.

To paraphrase William F. Buckley’s comment comparing being governed by the Harvard University faculty or random names in the Boston telephone book, I’d sooner be governed by the business people in the room Tuesday than by the elected officials who think the way to improve Wisconsin’s economy is to raise taxes $2.4 billion.