Tax and spend Denver Metro Chamber issues a call for more taxing and spending

Most Chambers of Commerce work to improve the business climates in their states and communities, but the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce continues to promote more taxing and spending, which helps the state’s contractors who seem to control the Chamber, but hurts every other business and taxpayer in the state. In a report with the misleading title, Toward a More Competitive Colorado, the Metro Chamber supports Governor Bill Ritter’s efforts to gut TABOR and give the historically irresponsible members of the General Assembly the power to tax and spend their ways into the billfolds of the state’s vendors. In looking at the summary of

the report on the Chamber’s web site, ignore the so-called challenges. Most reflect efforts to mislead with lousy statistics, such as the numbers related to spending on education in Colorado. Instead, look at the outcomes that Colorado has achieved. Note that the policies advocated by the Chamber and its friends in the Democratic Party would deeply erode Colorado’s competitive advantages. My comments are in red:

Highlights:

• No. 1 in highest ACT/SAT scores per 1,000 high school graduates (Comment: Outcomes are more important than spending figures such as those shown under “challenges.” Throwing money at schools is a waste of money.)
• Nation’s lowest obesity rate (Comment: State laws, policies have nothing to do with this, and politicians can’t do anything about it. People are obese or not depending on lifestyles and their genes, not because of how they’re taxed or brainwashed about obesity.)
• Second in economic outlook (Comment: Where does this come from? Seems out dated given the anti-energy policies and the tax and spend agendas of the Chamber and its Democrat friends.)
• Second for adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher (Comment: Yeah, we moved here with our degrees.)
• Third in Small Business Innovation Research Grants (Comment: The grants probably are a waste of money. If a business idea can’t attract private capital, it doesn’t deserve funding. Create a good business envirornment if you want to attract jobs to the state.)
• Third in venture capital per $1,000 of State Gross Domestic Product. (Comment: This will shrink if the Chamber and Democrats continue to seek higher spending and taxes.)
• Fourth for Initial Public Offerings (Comment: Penny stocks do not do much for an economy. For these companies to grow, the state has to be a good place to employ workers. The state’s labor dept. is better than many states’, but it still strikes me as anti-employer.)
• Fourth for cost of doing business (Comment. They must have spun those numbers real hard.)
• Fifth in number of new companies created per 1,000 employees (Comment: New companies create the most new jobs, not just small businesses. This shows we have a lot of Mom and Pop shops that need a good business environment. Companies with only a few employees are easy to move, which is why we were able to move 20 jobs here in 1992. Not sure we’d do it given the agenda of the Chamber and Colorado’s Democrats.) 
• Fifth for annual population growth (Comment: Just what the Chamber and its contractors want. Good for their bottom lines, but not good for people who’ve moved here for better life styles. The million or so folks who’ve moved here in the last 15 years have brought their tax and spend proclivities with them. We’re at risk of becoming another Illinois or California.)
• Seventh for entrepreneurial activity (Comment: Good and bad. Always good to see new businesses emerging. But a lot of those businesses are created by older workers who’ve been laid off as employers sought more cost effective ways of doing business and have moved jobs out Colorado to less expensive states and countries.)
• Eighth for science and engineering doctorate degrees. (Comment: So do we have Ph.D. mills in Colorado? As the son of a mechanical engineer with a lot of patents, I know that Ph.D.s aren’t the most creative people in the world. They’re good at academic gamesmanship, kissing up to their advisers and writing papers about obscure, mostly irrelevant topics. With four Ph.D.s in the family and having employed Ph.D.s, I respect what it takes to get a Ph.D. and have a feeling for what waste of time it can be. In other words, so what? Focus on educating the workers, not academics.)
• Ninth in employment growth (Again, under the Democrats, this won’t last long, and it doesn’t mean much in a recession.)
  
  

Challenges:

• Ranked 47th for state and local higher education support per full-time student (Comment: This has been shown to be a misleading and irrelevant statistic.)
• Also ranked 47th for student/teacher ratio in public elementary and secondary schools (Comment: See outstanding results above. They show it’s the raw material that counts, not the dollars poured down a black hole.)
• Ranked 29th in high school graduation rates (Comment: Well, if the Democrats and employers didn’t love illegal immigration so much, our graduation rates would be much higher. Correlate this with the number of single-parent families and see how the ratios work out in Colorado and around the country. Do we have more or fewer single-parent, non English-speaking families compared with other states?)
• Eighth-highest for local government share of total tax burden; while Colorado ranks 10th-lowest in state tax revenue per capita (Comment. This is bad? Why? Doesn’t this show more local control in Colorado than in other states? Looks pretty good to me.)
• Gross Domestic Product, a measure of productivity, down from 8th to 12th (Comment: Does this have anything to do with the drop in oil, coal, natural gas prices and other commodity prices? Do Colorado politicians have a secret hold on commodity prices? And how much of this is due to anti-business and anti-drilling policies favored by the state’s Democrats?)
• Per capita income down from 8th to 13th. (Comment: See above.)
• Export dollars per capita down from 33rd to 45th (Comment: See above.)

Links

Metro Denver EDC releases fifth competitiveness study

 

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