(01-05-2018 05:39 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote: No, it has nothing to do about not wanting to answer your question.
How you viewed us as being "on par" was not at all clear. Since I was only talking about being on par with corporate tax rates, I assumed you were also looking at just corporate taxes. Therefore, it wasn't clear why you felt it was necessary to continue to give concessions to businesses to catch up on some areas we currently lag behind Europe.
But you were talking about the overall regulatory and tax environment, at which point you're saying we excel in some areas, they do in others, and it's an overall wash in the end.
So let's say I want the US to mandate that employers guarantee paternity leave, something that literally only a handful of countries that are part of the UN don't guarantee, we need to give some concession to companies? Let's cut tax rates by another 0.1% so they can make up the lose in productivity? Or how about the government provides some sort of match and it works like other social safety nets so the employer isn't on the hook for 100% of the pay during the time off? I'm open to plenty of options, I'm just not really sure what ones would be on the table, it's a pretty wide open world we live in.
But in the end, I guess I don't fully agree with the concept that we must do a quid pro quo, especially when we would not be legislating in exceedance of other western, industrialized nations.
I'm not quite sure why you didn't understand the "on par" comment. I pretty much spelled out all the details. I do the same with my undergraduate international business law students, and they seem to grasp it pretty clearly. We're better in some areas than other countries, worse in others. On balance, it's about par, depending on what factors are most important to a particular investment decision. I take the position that more investment, growth, and jobs are good things, and tend to improve the lot of the middle class, in particular. If you disagree with that basic position, then perhaps that is the reason for our differences.
So if we start at about a par overall with other countries, and we do something to make it relatively worse here than it was before, then we have made it worse than it is in other countries as well. That will drive investment, growth, and jobs to those other countries, to the extent that whatever we have made worse impacts a decision.
So if we start out at A (us) = B (them), and we change A to A-1, then A-1<B and we have to add a +1 to get back to equal with B. That -1 could be more leave and vacation or cap and trade (things which you have proposed and I actually think are good), so we have to come up with a +1 to offset it to get us back to a push. I would actually favor a +2 or +3 so the field clearly swings our way. And then maybe we could look at some of the other things you want to get us back down to par or slightly better. So I'm open to your social issues, but there clearly has to be a quid pro quo, which is what we have lacked all too often.
Here's how I would go after it. Regulatory reform would be huge for me. Europe generally has tougher, or at least as tough, regulations in most areas. But their regulatory process provide more reasonable and speedy and predictable results. And businesses prefer certainty and speed, and are willing to pay more to get them. I would go for increasing regulation of some areas that matter, in exchange for reducing or removing regulations in areas that don't matter, and going to procedures that had more due process protections. I'd do three things--subject rule making to congressional review, put in sunset review for all agencies and regulations every 10 years, and move adjudication of disputes from captive ALJs within the agencies to a separate article III administrative law court. Under that setup, jurisdiction and venue for all disputes would be in the district where the cause of action arose, rather than in the DC Circuit.
Then I would do a consumption tax and use the funds to 1) balance the budget, freeing up capital markets, 2) fund Bismarck universal private health insurance/care, removing a large cost from employers, 3) implement a guaranteed basic income, and 4) lower and flatten income tax rate structures (we could possibly eliminate the individual income tax altogether). With lower operating costs and increased availability of capital, plus the protective aspects of a consumption tax, this would make US businesses much better off.
In exchange for these, we could look at the reforms you want. We could end up far more attractive an investment destination than today, at the same time as we add some of the worker and social protections you want. That looks like a win-win to me. How about you?
The relevance of this to the original question is that this is how I would expect a business-friendly politician to think and act. Come to think of it, I can't think of many democrats or republicans who think that way, which is probably why I don't support either one.