Reply to Intra-county rivalry in MoCo

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No, it's not. It's a gross oversimplification.

I don't want to live in a county where the #1 priority is bringing in businesses so they can pay taxes and hire more people to pay taxes. All that does is cause runaway sprawl and overdevelopment. Businesses aren't a community. Businesses don't like paying fair wages. Businesses don't care about the environment. Businesses don't care about schools. Businesses don't care about the homeless. Businesses don't care about getting rid of guns. Businesses don't care about affordable low income housing. All businesses care about is making money. And keeping money by paying as few taxes as possible.

Instead of luring businesses in, we should be asking the wealthy in Montgomery county to pay their fair share. Sorry, but if your HHI is over $100K, you need to be carrying more of the burden, because you're not doing enough.

The county's biggest problem is we have cowards who won't stand up to the rich and demand they pay their fair share. That's how you fix this. [/quote]

I'm as left wing as they come, but THIS my friend is a gross oversimplification.

SOME businesses don't pay fair wages, or care about the environment, or schools, or the homelessness. Not all. We need an incentive structure that rewards ethical business practices, and draconian and/or outdated blanket regulations aren't going to do this, which, by the way, is something Marc Elrich of all people is actually looking to do. Go through regulations and toss out the ones we don't need.

Of course, we need to think beyond the surface argument that "business friendly" = less regulation and less taxes. It's not more or fewer regulations, it's "which" and "how." We need to look at our regulatory system and bring it into the 21st century and not take such a one-size-fits-all approach. A bare minimum of regulation is needed to ensure competitiveness. Also, I'm tired of people saying that we need to grow our tax base and then saying taxes on businesses are too high in the same breath. It's about balance, we need to tax businesses just enough that we can pay for progressive social programs while also allowing local businesses to thrive. It's a math problem. 
If you don't tax enough, services will decline and the county will be unlivable. If you tax too much, especially smaller businesses, then they won't be able to make it. Balance.
Hardly a leftist communist manifesto.

Also, income thresholds are more complicated. I don't think $100K is considered rich here. It's survivable. A single person could maybe get by on $75K in east county. A family needs over $100K or else they'd be living pretty bare-bones. Things are just that expensive here. It's the households over $300K and beyond that don't pay their fair share, and that's because they have lawyers to help them get out of it. Heck, we could probably lower taxes on people making less than $150K if we could get everyone else to pay what they are supposed to and not weasel their way out of it. And if certain real estate developers didn't try to pay off politicians to write their own legislation, maybe ordinary homeowners wouldn't have been facing those awful property tax increases. Not trying to single out any County Executive candidate or anything...but maybe I am. [/quote]

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