Seems like just last spring faux economist Arthur Laffer was telling Tennessee’s House-Senate Fiscal Review Committee that Fred Smith was going to pack up his Memphis-based Federal Express in a gigantic purple and white box and head for someplace without an inheritance tax:
“I spent about two hours with Fred Smith three days ago up in Memphis, and he said he’s gettin’ out of this state if it doesn’t happen.And now we don’t want to lose FedEx. Fred Smith’s a couple of classes behind me at Yale and he’s a good friend.”
Ah, the memories. Smith told Laffer to shut his yap, he wasn’t leaving Tennessee because of taxes or for any other reason — indeed, he said he’s not going anywhere. Laffer just made it all up.
And I daresay Laffer and Smith are no longer BFF’s, Yale ties notwithstanding, after this:
In a CNN interview, Smith described the idea that raising the rates on the top 2 percent of income earners would kill jobs as “mythology.”
Smith goes on to say that the majority of jobs created in the U.S. come from capital investment in equipment and software, not small business.
I had no idea Smith was such a Socialist/Commie/hippie. Smith isn’t the only member of the corporate class telling the Tea Party wackos to hit the road: CEOs from AT&T, Northrop Grumman, Goldman Sachs and more have handed the GOP a steaming cup of STFU. As Joe Conason observes:
Remarkably, the Tea Party Republicans have now alienated their party’s most important constituency — the upper echelon of the business community. It is a profound irony that the issue raising friction between these politicians and their erstwhile backers is a fanatical partisan determination to defend the tax benefits enjoyed by those same wealthy executives.
I’m just curious, who’s left in the Tea Party besides the local tricorn hat suplier, Victoria Jackson, Ted Nugent and some wackos following Michele Bachmann around?