Recently the state of Michigan made a big bet. The government decided that they could spend money more efficiently than businesses could, so they raised business taxes. I don’t understand the logic making it harder for businesses when a good percentage of your work force is looking for jobs. The result is that businesses are moving out of Michigan. This along with a number of companies simply shutting down is putting a strain on the economy.
The thought of “if we only had more money we could fix our problems” is prevalent in government, business and personal life. If your focus is on getting more money you will often overlook solutions that actually solve the problem. Worse still, the “money” solutions often turn out to create new problems that are worse that what you were originally trying to fix.
New Zealand is doing a lot to promote economic growth by making it cheap to run a business. They’re consistently lowering business taxes and they’ve dropped the cost of registering a business as low as it can go, and it seems to be working.
@Joel – What is the business tax rate in NZ?