American Forum

TENNESSEE EDITORIAL FORUM

By Phil Schoggen

It’s about time we introduce some commonsense into the discussion about how to stimulate the economy. Whether we’re talking about the state or national economy, the worn-out mantra seems to be the same -- to stimulate the economy, we need to cut taxes. But such short-sighted action is likely to do more harm than good to both the economy and the common good.

The argument that taxes are simply bad for the economy is based on the false assumption that, somehow, after these taxes are collected, the money just magically vaporizes into thin air. But it’s not that simple, because there’s another side of the coin that gets ignored in this anti-tax narrative.

The money that is collected through our tax system gets invested in things like healthy kids and seniors, new schools, retaining good teachers, stocking libraries, improving roads, expanding mass transit, building parks, and paying our hard-working police officers just to name a few. These are things that we as a community have decided are important investments for us to make in order to strengthen the common good and the communities we live in.