Economic Freedom Zones (credit, visa, pension, tax)

[LauraC]

I read this morning that Rand Paul has been invited by the NAACP to speak at a historically black college in Kentucky about his proposal for Economic Freedom Zones. He will also be interviewed about it on C-SPAN on Sunday. I know about Paul's liberty positions on most issues, but I'm not business/economic savvy enough to evaluate this one. If I post this in the political forum, I'm going to get political responses based solely on people's opinion of Libertarians or Paul, with no analytic meat in the responses about the workability or potential success of the actual proposal so I hope it's okay to post this here where people are more astute on economic issues.

Here's a link to the proposal if you are not familiar with it. It is not long. Can you give me the pros and cons of it, in your opinion, as to whether it could be successful and if you also have an opinion, on whether it's do-able as far as implementation goes. Thanks.

http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/doc...eedomZones.pdf

[GiantRutgersfan]

I dont think its viable for many reasons. First of which is that economically sound states would never agree to this kind of federal intervention.

The real issue that that something like this is ripe for misuse/abuse. Take for example a pharmacist employed by Walgreens and living in an impoverished area of Kentucky. He is already doing pretty good and making $100,000 a year. This law would make him a king by effectively granting him $28,000+ more a year to do with as he pleases for no real reason....

[jtur88]

That would imply that you can go to an entrepreneur in some areas and say "I'm sorry, but you are not in an economic freedom zone."

[jtur88]

This brings to mind the protestors who are arrested for being outside the "Freedom of Speech Zone". It is amazing how the word "Freedom" can be attached to certain "approved" activities, in order to make people think freedom is actually a widespread characteristic of American life, and that this is the only country where little bits of freedom actually get doled out. with great attendant flag-waving.

[EmeraldCityWanderer]

It's always amazing how people attach freedom to something bad.

Such as Pauls idea which would give freedom to the business to operate without reguards to eviromental laws (dump uranium next door, okay), eliminates land use restrictions (bulldoze a wildlife sanctuary for strip mining...or lead smelting plant next to a school, hell yeah), eliminate signed contracts for wages/pensions so businesses can dictate what they want to pay, eliminating visa requirements for workers from outside of the country, eliminate regulations for enviormental health and safety of workers, and states deciding what they actually owe pensioners.

Parts are nice where he looks at increasing money for education, increasing tax credits for families, and cleanup of abandoned properties...but significantly lowers all taxes to 5% for businesses excluding payroll, which will be 2%. It also increases expensing to 100% for all goods and services (state and federal) and eliminate capital gains taxes (state and federal).

So this bill would allow businesses to do what they want to people and the enviroment, hire overseas if they like instead of local workers, have the rest of the voters pay enromous amounts of money to businesses to do so.