Deval: Abby, thanks for agreeing to meet. While I was away trying to get corporations over seas to invest in Massachusetts I heard some very disturbing news.
Abby: I know about your concerns about the Marlbough situation, but we really needed to consolidate.
Deval: We’ll get to that, but what happened that troubled me the most was the announcement that now:
the top 400 richest americans now have more wealth then 50% of the citizens of our entire county!
Do you understand what that means? 400 people own more then 150 million. And you, according to Forbes magazine, are one of those 400. I think you are worth $13 billion.
Abby: but i worked for that.
Deval: Alot of middle and working class people want to work hard also, but folks like you won’t create jobs. We can’t sustain a society where folks like you horde your money and don’t invest jobs, putting people to work.
Abby: Lets talk about Marlbough.
They’ve created vast sums of income for the people of massachusetts and grew their company in massachusetts from 1946 until 2006. Then Deval came in, brought in his anti-business attitude and close to 40% of those jobs went elsewhere in America.
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p>I think the Johnson’s have far and away done their fair share. If I were them I’d really go Galt. Keep pushing and most people with money will. Its their money, not yours. You have no right to have any of it. Neither does the government.
the fire department, the police department, or benefit in any way from the existence of the military. If the rich want to never pay a dime toward keeping society running, toward educating the children of the inferior castes, or responding to emergencies, then they should probably just form their own private country, buy an island somewhere, and live there. Or maybe build a rocketship and move to Mars. I wonder if they’ll invite people like you to come along with them, Eabo?
EaBo, you never cease to entertain. Long may you flourish.
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p>John Galt wouldn’t have made it through his first winter in Ouray, Colorado. His last act would have been to burn Atlas Shrugged in a desperate attempt to stay warm before he froze to death.
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p>Don’t you think that we all owe something, even just a little, to, for example, the people who died on D-Day to help make Europe free?
whom will the Johnson’s bilk with exhorbitant service charges on the spindly little 401K’s of those fortunate enough to have any?
EaBo, you are a comedic genius. Yeah, I’m sure that Fidelity was on a steady path of ever-increasing jobs for the 60 years between 1946 and 2006, through the three Dukakis administrations and all the rest of it — and then mean ol’ job-killing Deval came in, and suddenly the pendulum swung the other way.
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p>Of course, if you want to bring back the Duke for Governor in 2014, I’m game!
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p>Welcome to Mogadishu, the land where the government has no right to any of anybody’s money.
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Because as we know, the assault of Massachusetts government on individual wealth is just like Mogadishu’s depravity.
Since Obama’s election, Eabo’s positions have become decidedly radical (using the term dispassionately) in that he has advocated a shrunken state with no example among advanced countries either now or historically. These days liberals seem at most to advocating policies that already exist elsewhere in this world — mostly successfully: Healthcare like Canada or France, social tolerance like the Netherlands, social safety net like Germany. What Eabo and brethren advocate is economics like Ayn Rand novels.
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p>Utopian movements, from Cromwell to Lenin, spill blood. Perhaps the Mogadishu comparison is apt in a different way. Until his side spells out their huge plans for social engineering and approaches those with much more seriousness than they approached their previous adventure in social engineering (their botched interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan), let Somalian comparisons goad them to think through more carefully what they advocate.
If the government has no right to your money, do you have any right to use anything provided by the government?
Because it’s impossible. EaBo is well aware that the private sector is never going to supply roads, bridges, police, etc. etc. He is therefore fully aware that his stated position on this thread and elsewhere – which I take to be that all tax rates should be 0% – basically means anarchy, and is likely to lead to something like my previous comment.
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p>So if he engages, he’d be forced to admit that the government has to collect some taxes, and the only real debate is how much. And at that point, he has already lost.
Lalitha, on what basis do you say she is hoarding her wealth? I assume that most of her wealth is her ownership stake in Fidelity. Is that hoarding?
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p>Eabo, what policies of Governor Patrick caused Fidelity to relocate those jobs?
Which means, I guess, that he didn’t kiss quite enough Johnson ass. The rich should never have to leave a message.
The point i was trying to make is that: as wealth becomes concentrated in few and fewer hands, it is taken out of circulation and not being used to put people to work. I don’t know where Johnson stashes the money, (stocks, bonds, cayman islands etc.) If, for example, she paid a slighlty higer state income tax rate , that money would be used to hirer teachers, cops, etc. These folks would then spend their money in the state helping small businesses and the local economy. They don’t take it out of circulation, or stash it overseas, like the fabulous 400 do.
I think your two points don’t relate to each other. Since Fidelity is a family company, and the Johnson’s have never sold out, it is likely that the bulk of her wealth is “stashed” in Fidelity itself, which employs a lot of people in a lot of businesses. That wealth is indeed circulating.
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p>If you want her to pay a higher marginal tax rate, that has nothing to do with her net worth, or the form that her wealth takes.
Why would Deval go to Abby to complain about wealth inequality, when the issue at hand is why her company is relocating its business? Asking Fidelity’s executives to give away their money if they decide to hire elsewhere is a non sequitur. The conversation is more appropriately as follows:
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p>Abby: Deval, thanks for meeting with me, so I can thank you personally for so much moola in the past few years! When we asked to jump in on Raytheon’s gravy train back in 1996, we never figured Gov. Weld would really go along with it, it was so brazen!!! We didn’t need it, but, hey, if you guys are giving, we’re taking! Gosh, I’ve made so much money on that, I need to hire someone to count it for me (hey, there’s a job I could create for ya!). We’ve collected hundreds of millions of dollars, in years red and blue, whether we were hiring or firing people. America is a great country to reward hard-working, smart people like me and my lobbyists.
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p>Deval: But Abby, why are you being so ungrateful? Don’t you feel any sense of obligation to stay, employ our worthy workers, and not show us up as gullible idiots? Or worse, corrupt and venal exploiters of the public’s trust? Wait, maybe that’s not worse. Let me think.
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p>Abby: But,Deval, we have business plans to maximize our profits. And you always knew that tax breaks don’t change business plans. You even told the Boston Globe, back when you were first running, that you’d “take a dim view” of using state tax incentives to lure businesses, because “companies whose plans turn on tax breaks probably aren’t worth attracting, ” and that “a business that makes a decision on the basis of a tax break alone, that’s a business that’s on its way out of business.” And you were so right; as we told you and Gov. Romney before you, when you were looking to throw more money at us, our plans don’t depend on those subsidies.
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p>But YOUR plans do. Politicians like you know they can’t really “create jobs” this way; or you should know, because it’s been alarmingly well documented. But you have to look like you’re doing SOMETHING about unemployment and “economic development” and all that stuff. So you do what you call “investing in job creation” – picking companies you think might work out and hang around, and shovel money at them. Then, whoever gets hired, you take the credit. When they lay off and move for various business reasons, you say, “well, that’s the economy, not my fault.” And of course, it’s not your fault — but if you hadn’t given us all that loot, you’d have billions, BILLIONS of dollars around to spend on public hiring, education, unemployment benefits and retraining, and infrastructure that would actually BE factors in whether companies come here.
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p>Deval: Why don’t you cough up a few bucks and make a nice donations to some good cause – you owe us! And it would help save my face, too! Gimme somethin’ here! Brother, can you spare a dime?
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p>Abby: Hey, don’t be sour now about how rich I am. I got this way thanks to you and your buddies; and you all stayed in office thanks to whatever we did that you could point to and take credit for. Look, you collected a few dollars while you were working for corporations like mine too, right? And no one is scowling at you, asking to give it back, and you aren’t offering, either — no matter how few people own more than half the rest of the population.
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p>At this very moment, it’s not working out so well for you, but we and the others leaving town did what you wanted: we hung around until after you were safely elected. But you always knew, and now, we gotta do what we gotta do, and you…well, you’re good for four years, and then – or maybe before! — you can step up to some better job. You know YOU aren’t going to be unemployed, right?
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p>So you can stop flexing the muscles now, and go think about what businesses really do look for. Don’t let the place get all run down with all your slash-and-burn stuff – then NO ONE will want to be here, not businesses and not residents either. That’s what they mean by the race to the bottom, Deval. Don’t win that one!
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p>Take care, and thanks again, to you and all politicians who make America golden — for some of us.
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