Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Saturday named Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidential running mate.
Their private sector experience – and the policy agenda they champion – makes them far and away the better choice in November.
Including on Internet and Technology policy.
Americans will have more and cheaper access to more technology in a Romney-Ryan Administration. Their less taxation, less regulation, actual reform agenda will make things better for all businesses – Tech joints included.
And that will kick into overdrive the currently stalling Electronic Revolution.
Behold just some of the Tech sector improvements to come – if the nation wisely goes White House Republican.
You will notice: what is bad for the Tech economy is bad for overall economy – and vice versa. There is nothing magically different about Tech economics that requires markedly different policies.
Regulation Additions and Job Losses
The Tech sector had been for years – pre-President Barack Obama – a jobs creation machine. Why? Because it was almost totally regulation-free.
President Obama is proactively, illegally ending that.
The President has via unlawful Executive fiats imposed on the Tech sector a huge, all-encompassing new uber-regulation – Network Neutrality – and a whole host of others large and small.
As a result, the Tech sector has been hemorrhaging jobs at a rapidly accelerating rate.
Overall unemployment under President Obama peaked at 10% in October 2009, and dropped slowly to settle at a still egregious 8.3% for most of 2012.
Tech sector job losses have, however, accelerated dramatically as the Obama illegal regulatory regime has taken firmer hold.
Tech Layoffs Hit 3-year High of 51,529 in First Half of 2012
The more Obama we get, the worse it is for the Tech sector.
Romney, meanwhile, has long been campaigning on deregulation. He’s a businessman – he knows how damaging overregulation is. And Ryan’s budget is, amongst other helpful things, decidedly deregulatory.
Romney-Ryan will bring gigs back to the Tech sector. At the very least, they will not actively, serially attack it a la the current Administration.
[As to actual votes: Congressman Ryan voted to undo President Obama’s Net Neutrality power grab. And he voted against the overly broad, overreaching Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA).]
Tax Reform
The tax code is tens-of-thousands-of-pages of nightmare mess. To which President Obama has – added thousands of pages.
With things like ObamaCare. Which pummels us with twenty new taxes, and for which the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has hired 2,700 new bureaucrats.
Then there’s Taxmageddon – looming at year’s end. When rates increase and a cavalcade of the a la carte special interest tax break goodies – that help make our code so patently absurd – at once all come to an end.
President Obama, for his part, wants to maintain the portion of Taxmageddon that raises by 4.5% taxes on about 1.2 million small businesses.
Which brings us back to jobs – or the lack thereof.
If you raise taxes on businesses, they have less coin to expand and hire individuals.
If you raise taxes on individuals – including rich ones – they’ll have less coin with which to go out and stimulate the economy. By buying groceries – or yachts.
You don’t like rich people buying yachts? Ask the poor people building the yachts how they feel about it.
And perhaps most directly important to the Tech sector, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate on Planet Earth. When countries like Botswana are starting to look preferable for setting up shop, you’re doing something wrong.
Romney was campaigning on tax reform long before Congressman Ryan was a Veep gleam in anyone’s eye. And it is one of Ryan’s signature issues. He even wanted to do it in this, a Presidential election year – in part to address Taxmageddon.
Romney-Ryan want to dramatically simplify the code, rid us of the endless array of special interest breaks and lower the rates. For everyone. Rich, poor, businesses – everyone.
Which again brings us back to jobs.
If you lower taxes on businesses, they have more coin to improve, expand and hire individuals.
If you lower taxes on individuals, they have more coin to better their lives – and the lives of everyone with whom they do business. Which is good for businesses, which means they have more coin to….
And if you lighten the tax and regulatory code load, everyone has more time and money to dedicate to bettering their jobs, their businesses and their lives.
The Obama Administration has spent three-plus years significantly increasing taxes and regulations, and densifying the already impenetrable tax and regulatory oeuvres.
Romney-Ryan will stop the government’s encroachment, and start to prune back the Kudzu Leviathan.
For anyone having anything to do with Tech – or anything to do with anything productive – whom to choose in November should be fairly obvious.