| Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #361 09/01/2021 |
| 1) Democratic Governor Says Best Income Tax Rate is “Zero” Nine states – all of them red, except for Washington – have no income tax. These states like Florida and Texas have consistently enjoyed higher rates of economic growth, business formation and lower unemployment. Now Democratic Governor Jared Polis of Colorado says his state should join the no income tax club and abolish its 4.55% state income tax. “It’s obviously easier said than done, but in effect when you tax something you penalize it,” Polis said during a panel discussion with CTUP-co founder Arthur Laffer at the conservative Steamboat Institute conference. Asked what the state’s income tax rate should be, Polis said, “It should be zero. We can find another way to generate the revenue that doesn’t discourage productivity and growth….and we should.” “So if we can move away from taxing income, which is something that you don’t want to discourage, because we want everybody to make income, we want companies to make income — that’s a great thing — to basing it on taxing pollution or carbon or something that we fundamentally don’t want, you’ll have a more pro-growth tax structure that gets the right incentives in place to help grow what you wanna grow and penalize things that are negative externalities.” Unfortunately, Colorado isn’t close to following Polis’s suggestion. His liberal Democratic legislature wants to scrap the state’s “flat tax” and replace it with a progressive structure. We’re heartened to see a Democratic governor recognize the anti-growth impact of taxing economic activity. Here’s hoping he keeps spreading the gospel to other Democrat governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.  |
| 2) Vaccines Still Highly Effective In Preventing Hospitalization The CDC this week released hospitalization data by vaccination status through July 24:  This is a very informative chart, but CDC really should add vaccination status to the publicly facing COVID-NET data so the public can see this data on a weekly basis. Morgan Stanley reviewed this and several other recent studies and concluded: “We believe misinterpretation of data from observational studies (which are already subject to significant bias) and a lack of understanding around how vaccine efficacy is calculated to have contributed to investor concerns. While we continue to believe the pandemic will persist until 2022 when enough global vaccinations are achieved to drive down case numbers and reduce the risk of new variant development, we remain optimistic that the tools available including vaccines, antibodies and oral antivirals remain robust.” |
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