NC Conservatives Issue Stern Rebuke Of Washington Post’s Distortion of NC Tax Cuts

Donald Bryson is the Executive Director of Americans For Prosperity – North Carolina. He is a fount of cogent defenses of free market principles, among them the moral and practical benefits of tax reductions.

When the Washington Post sent a reporter to North Carolina to “report” on the effects of the Old North State’s Republican-led tax reforms, they did so already knowing the story they were going to write and sought out Democrats to confirm their Leftist view of conservative tax policy.

Bryson is having none of it, and penned a piece for National Review to give readers the real story on tax reform that WaPo was so intent on covering up.

“Recently, the Washington Post offered readers a “peek into a world after a massive tax cut” — a visit to Alamance County, in my home state of North Carolina, where reporter Todd C. Frankel rode along with factory owner Eric Henry. Henry, whose T-shirt-manufacturing company “almost went belly-up in the in the mid-1990s,” said he’s been doing well in recent years and his business is growing. This summer, he had his best production month ever and gave a bonus to his employees. But, he said, he didn’t know people who benefit from North Carolina’s tax cuts.

I’d say he should look in the mirror. The truth, somewhat obscured by the article’s anecdotes, is that millions of North Carolinians like Eric Henry and his workers have steady jobs and live in a more prosperous economy because of North Carolina’s tax cuts. Just five short years ago, our economy was floundering and unemployment hovered around 10 percent. Since then, we’ve added 245,000 people to our labor force and the unemployment rate has been slashed almost in half. That’s a whole lot of folks who are better off now than they were then. And there’s no doubt that their improved fortunes are attributable to our tax cuts.”

Why is it so hard for those on the Left to understand that letting individuals and business owners keep more of the money they earn is not only the right thing to do, it has all sorts of positive economic (and social) effects?

The Left demonized tax cuts as ‘gifts’ to the wealthy, when the truth is that tax cuts in North Carolina lowered rates on everyone who pays income taxes and nearly doubled the standard deduction to protect more lower income money from taxation than ever before.

“Since 2013, our corporate income-tax rate has dropped from 6.9 percent to just 3 percent — the lowest rate nationwide in states with a corporate tax. It will fall again to 2.5 percent in two years. Our personal income-tax rate, which was close to 8 percent, is now 5.5 percent and will drop to 5.25 percent in 2019, delivering $2.8 billion in tax relief to North Carolinians over the next five years. And the standard deduction, which has already doubled, will have more than tripled by 2019. Because of these reforms, our state made the “most dramatic improvement” in the history of the Tax Foundation’s Business Tax Climate Index, jumping from No. 41 to No. 11 in just one year. When North Carolina first embarked on its tax-cutting effort, naysayers warned that revenues would plummet and our state would face a budget crisis. Among them was Alexandra Sirota, director of the left-leaning North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, who predicted in 2013 that the cuts would “weaken North Carolina’s tax system and broader economy.” She also said they would “[jeopardize] our future by undermining the long-term ability of our state to maintain the building blocks of a strong economy.”

Happily, Ms. Sirota and others have been proven wrong.”

Read more about why the Left and their Washington Post sympathizers are wrong, and why conservative tax policies are a win for people and principle, here.

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