RI Senator- Tax Rates Don’t Affect Small Businesses

Tax policy was the subject of a panel, titled 98 to 2: Raising Taxes to Invest in America and Promote Fairness, held in Washington last month. The panel was associated with former Obama administration official and radical Van Jones’s Take Back the American Dream Conference, which basically aims to advance progressivism.

The panel consisted of several prominent progressive activists and politicians, among them Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Tea Partiers are racists and part of white supremacist militias fame.

The main goal of the panel was finding the best way to sell tax increases to the American people and to counter the Republican idea that taxing the rich hurts jobs, since the rich are  usually job creators. Amidst the debate, Senator Whitehouse chimes in with the stunning statement that he isn’t aware of a single small business in Rhode Island that is affected by tax rates.

“What works well for me at home, I don’t have this, you know, poll-tested…I say, look I don’t know a single small business in Rhode Island that is going to be made or broken by tax rates.  What’s going to make or break small business is whether people are actually coming through the door to spend money, whether they have customers.”

What Senator Whitehouse’s ridiculous statement fails to take into account is a recent meals tax proposal that caused an uproar among small businesses in his state. The proposal to add a 10% tax to all meals caused an aggressive campaign against the proposed tax, lead chiefly by restaurants. Cities like Newport, which rely on money tourists bring in, through restaurants especially, complained that the tax would crush them. It would force them to raise prices, which would drive away business.

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the nation, and has some of the highest taxes on small business in the nation. Unemployment is well above the national average, about 11% in May, and every year, more and more businesses leave the state because of the high costs Rhode Island’s high taxes cost business owners.

Maybe Senator Whitehouse should spend a little less time participating in panels sponsored by communists, and a little more time amongst his constituents.