kratak's comments

I wouldn't consider Boston a "college town", and I doubt it qualifies according to this article.* A "college town" usually means a town where the college dominates the local economy, and the students make up a large portion (or even a majority) of the total population during the school year.

I used to go to Virginia Tech; at the time, there were roughly 34k people in the town during the year, 26k of those students. The "townies" were only about 8k (and of course, this included the staff and faculty that lived within town limits, which was a significant portion of the townies). So when it was summertime, the town was seemingly deserted (and it was a wonderful time too!).

* As an example, Tempe, Arizona is home to ASU, one of the top 10 universities in the US by enrollment. Look at the map in the article: there's no dot for the Phoenix metro area. Hence, Tempe (and the rest of Phoenix) is not a "college town", because even with over 50k students, the school doesn't dominate the local economy.

The unemployment rate is BS. The important number is the labor participation rate.

Flat tax is a horrible libertarian idea that simply hurts lower-income people, because to get the same revenue you end up having to massively raise the taxes on the lower classes, which they can't afford since they're already struggling to make ends meet. We've had progressive taxation in this country since the invention of income tax, for good reason. If you want simpler taxes, you don't need a flat tax, you just need to eliminate all the deductions and credits. Calculating a progressive tax is not hard: you just see which bracket your income falls into, and then do the simple calculation. Or, you just look it up in a table which most people do.

How do you decide which neighborhoods qualify, and which don't? Just offering a tax credit isn't going to convince many people to start a business in a poor neighborhood anyway; usually, people avoid them because they don't want to work in a poor neighborhood every day, and because they worry about their safety. So are you going to have the government create businesses there?

Also, what about poor rural people? It doesn't make any sense to start businesses there, because the population density is too low (and again, how do you convince people to start businesses in economically unviable areas?). The ruralites need to move to where the jobs are, but they don't want to do that.

This is a bad title.

This article is not proposing a tax credit for startup workers at all. It's proposing a tax credit for everyone. It tries to make the case that this would be good for startup companies. But the proposed tax credit is NOT confined to workers at startups, at least that's the way the article reads. It says so right in the first paragraph: "a giant negative income tax for the average American." Average Americans do not work at startups.