The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 7 of 13)

p>In Europe, the debate over payroll taxes and their impact on employment is considerably more advanced than it is here. In recent years, several European nations have cut payroll taxes. And more payroll tax cuts are coming. In Germany, the conservatives last year campaigned on a pledge to boost employment by reducing payroll taxes by 2 percentage points. Italy is committed to expanding employment by reducing payroll taxes by 5 percentage points. In France, payroll taxes on minimum wage employees working in small businesses are being abolished. Sweden is doing the same. Slovenia last year approved a plan to abolish its payroll tax by 2009. Two years ago, Russia slashed its payroll tax rate by ten percentage points. While many of the payroll tax cuts have come in nations with relatively high payroll taxes (e.g., Belgium), even nations with low payroll tax rates (e.g., Denmark) have recognized the value of cutting non-wage labor costs. In an increasingly competitive world, where labor costs are driving business to outsource jobs or relocate manufacturing facilities overseas, all nations -- including the U.S. -- need to be mindful of the impact that non-wage costs, like payroll taxes, have on employment levels. br> -- Bob Walker , President br> Get America Working br> Arlington, Virginia /p>

I was amening Tucker in his article "Bush the Gasoholic" until he made a nod toward a carbon tax. Tucker seems convinced that we're running out of oil, so he thinks it would be nice to ease us into higher prices with higher taxes on gasoline now. Let me see if I have the logic correct here: higher gasoline prices are coming in the distant future, which will shoot our economy in the foot, so let's blow off our knee caps now in order to make the pain of future price increases more bearable. Seriously, I can't understand the logic. If we fear higher prices in the future, why artificially create higher prices now?

The key to energy security is a free market. In a free market, prices naturally rise as the supply falls. Higher prices signal businessmen to invest in greater production or alternatives. Free markets will make the transition much less painful than any government-engineered process. Few people know about the transition from whale oil to petroleum that our country made in the middle of the 19th century, because it was relatively painless, and it was painless because the government at that time had the good sense to stay out of the market. On the other hand, the Federal government has made a complete mess of energy since Nixon's price controls in the early 1970s while wasting hundreds of billions of dollars through the Dept of Energy on fruitless research and welfare checks to major agri-businesses, such as Cargill and Archer Daniel Midland, for ethanol.

p>As for the love of Tucker's life, nuclear power, I'm all for it if the government would end the subsidies to it and make it recycle the fuel, as they promised in the beginning of the nuclear industry, instead of storing it under someone's mountain. Federal programs to store spent uranium are just another welfare check to an industry that refuses to pay its own way in life and distorts the free market. br> -- Roger D. McKinney br> Broken Arrow, Oklahoma /p>

Your article is ahead of any other journalists I have read today. Wait until the public goes out to buy corn on the cob for their summer backyard parties and find the price $18.00 a dozen. I have been an executive in the energy industry for 40 years and can tell you we do not need any imported oil. We need imported back bone.

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