We were flipping through the dead-wood version of the Denver Post this morning and almost spit out our coffee laughing when we came across an Op-Ed on Rollie's tax hike from an English teacher at Cherry Creek High School. Has the Tax Hike Team become so desperate and flailing that they send high school teachers to write their defense against independent studies showing up to 119,700 jobs could be lost due to the tax hike?

Just when you thought they couldn't get more desperate, they go and do something like this…and completely make even bigger fools of themselves. Check the nonsense:

“Despite the ideology of groups like the Common Sense Policy Roundtable, tax policy doesn’t drive the economy.”

The English teacher's economic lesson of the day: tax policy has no effect on the economy. Zero. Zilch. None.

"Taxes have one purpose: funding government responsibilities. Period. They aren't meant to manipulate the economy or employment, and don't reliably impact either. Thus, Colorado voters shouldn't try predicting potential job gains/losses from the small, temporary sales and income tax increase proposed by Sen. Rollie Heath. Despite warnings from some conservative groups, tax rates don't influence job choices or migration for the average American."

So Rollie's team's response to a study by a respected economist, with a proven track record of accurately gauging the jobs impact of tax increases, is to send out an English teacher to tell us tax policy doesn't matter? They must be in worse shape than we thought. 

Outside the world of The Scarlet Letter and Thoreau’s musings on Walden pond, economists look at you know, numbers, and figure out what kind of impact various tax policies might have on the economy. Despite the teacher dismissing out of hand all economists, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has stated clearly that keeping the Bush tax cuts in place would provide a "considerable" economic boost. 

This may come as news to Barack Obama, who railed on the Bush tax cuts in order to win a primary, but extended them last year for worry that higher taxes through the loss of the Bush tax cuts would compound our economic woes. Or how about Obama's former Chief Economic Advisor, Christina Romer:

Just before Christina Romer resigned her post last month as Obama's chief economic adviser, she and her husband, David H. Romer, wrote an analysis in the recent issue of the American Economic Review that was contrary to the White House's plan to reverse the Bush tax cuts.  

They concluded that "tax increases are highly contractionary" while adding that tax cuts have “very large and persistent positive output effects."

Or how about asking people who actually create jobs? From a Denver Business Journal report:

"Owners of farm-products stores along the state’s eastern border said they lost customers in the past year to stores in Nebraska or Kansas that advertised they could buy the same products there without having to pay the sales tax.  

Similarly, leaders in the software industry testified that some software businesses had decided to locate in other states because they saw instability in Colorado’s system of taxing their products."

The poor public school teacher's economic illiterate nonsense reminds us of a clip played recently on Grassroots Radio of fired Obama "green jobs" appointee nutter, Van Jones, leading a pack of liberals in chanting "we are not broke." Saying it doesn't make it true. Maybe Teach should stick to the themes and motifs in Catcher in the Rye and let people who know what they're talking about deal with the economics. 

At the end his story, the Cherry Creek public school teacher says that economists have successfully predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions. Humor. We get it. In that same vein, we would note that in each of those last 5 recessions (and countless times in between) teachers and others who benefit from higher taxes have said that higher taxes were needed to save our public schools. Now that we know that taxes have no impact on the economy, why not jack them up again — you know, to save our schools.

(Photo via Facebook)