Leighton e-mails to compare and contrast how government intervention in the economy is picking winners and losers in a most backward manner:
This is how out-of-hand things are getting. A glimpse into the relationship between government and business in the year 2009:
If your company is a failure, but in the financial or insurance sector, the government is waiting to prop you up with billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
If your company is successful, but selling a popular product and creating jobs, the government is going to come down hard and tax the bejeezus out of you.
Gotta love it when government begins distributing the wealth.
Before Leighton's e-mail, I had not heard of the plans of Florida Governor Charlie Crist (Republican in name if not in deed) to tax bottled water companies. It appears to be yet another case of government action based on flimsy premises, poor understanding, and baseless predictions. And the unintended costs will be far greater than whatever dubious benefits it was projected to achieve.
Instead, the governor's proposal will only drain jobs from our state and put more Floridians on the unemployment lines.
This policy, unfortunately, was conceived in a vacuum. Bureaucrats at the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) now admit that they did not discuss the proposed tax with anyone from the bottled water industry. In fact, it wasn't until after Crist released his proposed budget that they began gathering data on how much money the tax would raise. Further, they offer no scientific or economic data about how they arrived at the $60-per-thousand-gallon figure.
Apparently, all that matters is that water bottling companies are making a profit, which means we should be taxed.
That seems to be the prevailing attitude throughout government today.
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