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Dauphin, Schuylkill, Lebanon, Berks, Perry Counties, PA May 18, 2010 Election
Smart Voter

Generation of jobs.

By Allen Griffith

Candidate for US Representative; District 17; Republican Party

This information is provided by the candidate
The government does not generate long term productive jobs. Government only funds projects.
Statistics tell us the private sector - primarly small business, generates jobs. 60 to 80% of all jobs in any given year are generated by small business and the larger number is produced in an economic downturn. We could help small business in a number of ways. Currently the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to be eliminated. This will mean a tax increase for all. Capital gains and dividend taxes are scheduled to rise. This will kill investment. The estate tax will take 45% of everything a small business has, over the 3.5 million dollar exemption level. That means a small business worth 5 million dollars would pay $675,000.00 in taxes if the owner died. What business could endure such a loss. Regulations are terribly burdensome to small business. Companies with 20 or fewer employees pay as much as $8,000.00 per year/ per employee to meet regulatory obligations. Regulations are often found to be outdated, overlapping, complex and unreasonable. The small business owner finds it difficult to borrow when needed and presently stands in fear of inflation, higher taxes, higher interests and complete uncertainty regarding what might come next from our government. It is unlikely that the unemployment situation will change in our country until the government totally reverses its current policies on business in general and especially on small business. Our government has wasted billions of dollars through meaningless, pork barrel spending of the stimulus funds. Foolish projects have taken money that will never be recovered, while tax cuts to business would have generated millions of jobs to revive our economy. We must take action to help small business.

A second area of job creation would be opened up if we would revisit our international trade agreements. Currently we are running a 266 billion dollar trade deficit to China. We have lost literally millions of jobs to China, because we have borrowed about 800 billion dollars from them and seem afraid to hold them to our agreed upon practices. They dump loads of cheap exports into our economy including steel, toys and electronics. They tie their currency to ours - keeping theirs artificially low, so our products are expensive for their people and their products are cheap to our people. the currency is supposed to float so the market will determine its relatice value to the dollar. An additonal problem is that transnational/international corporations are based in the U.S., but do all their production in China because of cheap labor, but then bring their products back to the American consumer to be purchased here. Often those products do not meet our health and safety standards. Commonly called "free trade"; these procedures have not worked for America. Our economy has not sufficiently expanded and jobs have diminished.

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pa/state Created from information supplied by the candidate: April 18, 2010 20:27
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