Startups drop when taxes are cut

I respond to the Thursday Dispatch article “Tiberi seeks clues to uneven economy.” Timothy Kane, the JP Conte fellow in Immigration Studies at the Hoover Institution, said that when Jimmy Carter was president, 1 in 6 companies were startups. Now, it’s 1 in 12. “If we continue on that, 30 years from now we won’t have startups,” he said. “We’ll have highly regulated, big companies.” He said states like Ohio have done too little to encourage startups.

Apparently U.S. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Township, missed Economics class on the day the prof explained the effects of tax cuts on a nation’s economy. Did Tiberi also miss the clues in Timothy Kane’s comment? I noticed immediately that the number of startup businesses began to drop when income tax-cutting Ronald Reagan became president.

Where do these politicians (and voters) think the government gets its money to help startups? The U.S. government has primed the pumps of new companies since the beginning of our nation.

Stanley Krider Dublin Friday). Even for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose majority leadership in the Senate has been defined by obstructionism and hypocrisy, this brand of gutter politics represents a new low.

McConnell famously flouted his constitutional duty to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland in order to maintain a conservative court. He justified this by asserting without precedent that the American people “choose” the justice by choosing a president. The people spoke, and the candidate they chose by a margin of 3 million votes did not become the president.

President Donald Trump has every right to nominate whomever he wishes to the nation’s highest court. If that nominee fails to garner enough support to clear the modest 60-vote hurdle, however, the answer shouldn’t have been to upend centuries of Senate procedures to appoint an extremist candidate.

John Chick Columbus