Every time a tax increase on the rich is proposed, the Tea Party front men, Boehner and McConnell, holler “Class Warfare” as if any attempt at accomplishing justice and balancing budgets at the same time is somehow wrong. Calling tax increases on the rich class warfare is like calling affirmative action in college or corporate admissions the same. It is all part and parcel of the convenient compartmentalized thinking called privilege.
Privilege is the real class warfare and it is on-going. It is so pervasive it is subtle. We have heard of “too big to fail” when the Big Banks were bailed out. Privilege is too big to see.
Privilege starts with assumptions. It assumes that certain people deserve more than others based on distribution of wealth as it exists. It assumes, for instance, that white people deserve more than black people because white people have a larger share of the economic pie to begin with and always have had. In other words, never mind looking at how that picture came into being and is sustained. Just look at the picture, and assume that it exists by tradition, not privilege. Assume that the educational opportunities for blacks and whites are the same, that job opportunity is the same, and that we make of life what we put into it. Also assume that we do not have to think about these things because we have been taught a so-called self-evident truism that “All men are created equal.” We all theoretically come out of the starting blocks as equals.
Privilege is never to examine these assumptions. Privilege is being able to play along with the status quo and to assume we all get to climb the same ladders to success, or at least that we all have ladders to climb. The pervasive class warfare waged since the founding of this country has been the deliberate as well as privileged exclusion of groups of people from the most lucrative mainstream channels to success.
Taxing the rich is a way of reinvesting in the process that broadens the playing field for those less fortunate. It is not class warfare. Waiting for the rich to invest voluntarily in mechanisms that produce jobs in America is like waiting to win the lottery: the chances of winning are miniscule. There are too many opportunities worldwide to invest in that might yield a better return, especially through investing in the developing world.
What we need in America right now is for rich Americans to see their vast resources as a privilege rather than a right. With privilege comes responsibility. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates both see their wealth as a social responsibility, not as a personal hoard. When Buffett says he needs to be taxed more, he is recognizing his responsibility to his country and his privileged status. He also sees government as a proper vehicle in tough times through which opportunity can be expanded to include more citizens contributing to the greater good. Certainly, in a perfect capitalist world, opportunity would best be provided by private investment. However, investors, like consumers, look to invest in the best available investments regardless of country of origin. When a country is suffering a recession, global or otherwise, it is government that is most likely to invest directly in its own country’s economy through improved infrastructure. It may also invest in what it sees as future sources of domestic economic growth areas, but it can make some bad bets as the Obama administration did in Solyndra, the California solar collector company. Sticking to infrastructure reform is probably the better investment.
So when the Republicans, at the behest of Tea Party extremists, scream “Class Warfare,” just answer with the same answer that confronted the so-called unfairness of affirmative action. Affirmative action as a concept actually describes an affirmation of privilege in that the sons and daughters of privilege get to have their own lower entrance standards to college admission under the label “legacy.” While the less fortunate may also be held to similar standards under the same label of “affirmative action,” they would be better described as candidates for “affirmative correction.”
Taxing the rich is just another form of “affirmative correction.” “Class warfare” is a paltry cry made from privilege, and, in reality, an accurate assessment of a chronic condition.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?
I wonder if gated communities around America contain any liberals. The way liberals have been attacked for the past four decades you would think they would be busy building gated communities and even moats to keep the conservatives from spinning their fixed-axle tired beliefs across liberal lawns. But few liberals actually live in suburban gated communities and they generally do not spend their weekends mowing acres of grass as conservatives do in ritualistic homage to their real or imagined ancestors who once mowed fields of hay. Of course I am fantasizing. Most of them hire illegal immigrants to mow their fields of dreams.
Right now the Republican presidential candidates are debating about, among other efforts to fortify or dismantle, who can build the toughest, most impenetrable defense against unwelcome border crossings from Mexico. If conservatives can build a wall to keep law and order, they will. That you can count on. It is one of the ways orthodoxy maintains its purity.
Robert Frost has the narrator of his poem “Mending Wall” raise the question about walls that inevitably must be asked: “Why do they make good neighbors?” The narrator was responding to his neighbor’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The neighbor could not explain how the wall made good neighbors; he simply repeated the statement, as if it were self-evident.
Conservatives like what they perceive to be self-evident truths such as “life is not fair” and "that government is best which governs least."* They take the notion of self-evident truth from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence where self-evident truths are proclaimed in America’s famous formal declaration. There, Thomas Jefferson declares that “all men are created equal” except, of course, for those who are not considered in the count such as African-Americans and non-property holders at the time of the Preamble’s writing.
America has always had rebellious sorts represented in its literature. Huck Finn, for instance, when confronted with what are for him the orthodox strictures of the widow Douglas and Miss Watson, complains very early in the novel that all the food provided to him by the pair “was cooked by itself.” Then Huck delivers a cosmic statement that applies to much more than the separation of foods: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.” In that single statement author Mark Twain is suggesting that separation is not the solution. America is, in effect, a barrel of odds and ends and needs to let the natural evolution of things take its course. Separation is artificial, unnatural, and unsavory. Twain is preparing the 19th Century reader for the relationship Huck soon after develops with runaway slave Jim.
21st Century America is gradually “browning” and not because of global warming. Demographers project that by 2042 the majority of the U.S. population will be non-white.** We will be more of a blend of non-white minorities than a majority of whites. Huck would happily adapt to such an America.
Walls, like principles, can provide security. They can keep us anchored to a place in space, time, and thought. They can also bind us or confine us. We can become prisoners of our own creation. We can wall ourselves in as we wall something else out. There is always a loss for every imagined gain.
In fact, the wall along the Mexican border may end up protecting Mexico more than the United States. Mexico’s economy is on the rise; its birthrate is dropping; and there is less need for Mexicans to come to America where jobs are hard to find. By the time we build a sturdier wall along the border, we may no longer need one, but Mexico may.
Some of the most famous walls in history are monuments to ancient times reminding all who encounter them that they, too, are of questionable practical value beyond serving as tourist attractions. The Berlin Wall (what’s left of it), the Great Wall of China, and the many walls left by the Roman Empire scattered across Europe are reminders of how temporal the intentions of man are and how vestigial are his monumental works of stone.
Today the wall that keeps the Palestinians away from the continual expansion of Israeli settlements into their former land serves a short-term solution for Israeli immigrants and exacerbates a long range problem for the region. The Mexico-U.S wall may do the same. We, too, are walling out because we say we want law and order so long as it benefits those who hold power in the United States. At the same time we want freedom from law and order in order to exploit the weak by paying them a wage that brings a lower standard of living. Barriers to keep immigrants out of the country are good; barriers such as unions which protect workers from having to accept a lower standard of living are bad. What is your wall of protection is someone else’s barrier. No wall is neutral.
Frost ends his poem “Mending Wall” resigned to the fact that his neighbor will not question the principle handed down to him by his father even when the fence no longer serves any practical purpose:
I see him there/ Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/In each hand, like an old stone savage armed,/ He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/ Not of woods only and the shade of trees./ He will not go behind his father’s saying,/ And he likes having thought of it as well/He says again, “ good fences make good neighbors.”
* The latter quotation was first made popular by that counter-culture icon Henry David Thoreau who used it in the opening sentence of his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
**(http://articles.cnn.com/2008-08-13/us/census.minorities_1_hispanic-population-census-bureau-white-population?_s=PM:US).
Right now the Republican presidential candidates are debating about, among other efforts to fortify or dismantle, who can build the toughest, most impenetrable defense against unwelcome border crossings from Mexico. If conservatives can build a wall to keep law and order, they will. That you can count on. It is one of the ways orthodoxy maintains its purity.
Robert Frost has the narrator of his poem “Mending Wall” raise the question about walls that inevitably must be asked: “Why do they make good neighbors?” The narrator was responding to his neighbor’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The neighbor could not explain how the wall made good neighbors; he simply repeated the statement, as if it were self-evident.
Conservatives like what they perceive to be self-evident truths such as “life is not fair” and "that government is best which governs least."* They take the notion of self-evident truth from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence where self-evident truths are proclaimed in America’s famous formal declaration. There, Thomas Jefferson declares that “all men are created equal” except, of course, for those who are not considered in the count such as African-Americans and non-property holders at the time of the Preamble’s writing.
America has always had rebellious sorts represented in its literature. Huck Finn, for instance, when confronted with what are for him the orthodox strictures of the widow Douglas and Miss Watson, complains very early in the novel that all the food provided to him by the pair “was cooked by itself.” Then Huck delivers a cosmic statement that applies to much more than the separation of foods: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.” In that single statement author Mark Twain is suggesting that separation is not the solution. America is, in effect, a barrel of odds and ends and needs to let the natural evolution of things take its course. Separation is artificial, unnatural, and unsavory. Twain is preparing the 19th Century reader for the relationship Huck soon after develops with runaway slave Jim.
21st Century America is gradually “browning” and not because of global warming. Demographers project that by 2042 the majority of the U.S. population will be non-white.** We will be more of a blend of non-white minorities than a majority of whites. Huck would happily adapt to such an America.
Walls, like principles, can provide security. They can keep us anchored to a place in space, time, and thought. They can also bind us or confine us. We can become prisoners of our own creation. We can wall ourselves in as we wall something else out. There is always a loss for every imagined gain.
In fact, the wall along the Mexican border may end up protecting Mexico more than the United States. Mexico’s economy is on the rise; its birthrate is dropping; and there is less need for Mexicans to come to America where jobs are hard to find. By the time we build a sturdier wall along the border, we may no longer need one, but Mexico may.
Some of the most famous walls in history are monuments to ancient times reminding all who encounter them that they, too, are of questionable practical value beyond serving as tourist attractions. The Berlin Wall (what’s left of it), the Great Wall of China, and the many walls left by the Roman Empire scattered across Europe are reminders of how temporal the intentions of man are and how vestigial are his monumental works of stone.
Today the wall that keeps the Palestinians away from the continual expansion of Israeli settlements into their former land serves a short-term solution for Israeli immigrants and exacerbates a long range problem for the region. The Mexico-U.S wall may do the same. We, too, are walling out because we say we want law and order so long as it benefits those who hold power in the United States. At the same time we want freedom from law and order in order to exploit the weak by paying them a wage that brings a lower standard of living. Barriers to keep immigrants out of the country are good; barriers such as unions which protect workers from having to accept a lower standard of living are bad. What is your wall of protection is someone else’s barrier. No wall is neutral.
Frost ends his poem “Mending Wall” resigned to the fact that his neighbor will not question the principle handed down to him by his father even when the fence no longer serves any practical purpose:
I see him there/ Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/In each hand, like an old stone savage armed,/ He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/ Not of woods only and the shade of trees./ He will not go behind his father’s saying,/ And he likes having thought of it as well/He says again, “ good fences make good neighbors.”
* The latter quotation was first made popular by that counter-culture icon Henry David Thoreau who used it in the opening sentence of his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
**(http://articles.cnn.com/2008-08-13/us/census.minorities_1_hispanic-population-census-bureau-white-population?_s=PM:US).
Thursday, September 15, 2011
America: Modern Greece or Ancient Greece?
It turns out, when times are tough, capital gets concentrated and constipated. Moreover, competition is reduced. There are fewer players in any given game. There are more on the sidelines. Banks become conservative rather than cavalier. They lend less and only to sure bets, which means the tried and true, not the innovative and adventuresome. Banks get lean and mean. One needs to look no further than the 30,000 mere mortal employees to be released by Bank of America in the near future to understand the magnitude of the problem.
The elite in Washington, which includes both parties, have offered two scenarios for recovery. The Obama recovery plan includes a carrot-stick approach with tax incentives to stimulate small business and the loss of tax loopholes for the rich. The Republicans have nothing but carrots for the rich and sticks for the downtrodden. Their message to the poor is grab hold of your bootstraps, pull them up, and that gesture will pull you up as well. It’s a neat trick, like smoke and mirrors, and costs nothing. It also does nothing but leave the poor further behind and out of the running for the American Dream.
Government’s role in good times is to act as referee in the game of capitalism. In bad times it needs to act as re-distributor of wealth and initiator of play. Bad times are like end-games in Monopoly. There are no more properties to buy; there are no more hotels to place; the game is in the hands of the winner; the game is over, and it is time to start a new game, a new beginning. The meaning is in the journey to Park Place, not in sitting there at end-game.
Imagine an NFL season where all the top players are concentrated in one team. There would be no season. The sport would die. The results would be so predictable no one would subscribe. It is the uncertainty that makes the NFL vibrant. On any given day, any team might beat anyone else. There are mechanisms in place to assure competition. If we are so committed to competition in that arena, why are we so hesitant to foster it in our economy? Why do we not have strong mechanisms in place to ensure good competition in the marketplace?
The answer is capitalists try to eliminate competition. They do not thrive on it. A famous capitalist named John D. Rockefeller once proclaimed that competition is a sin. It therefore is up to government to make sure that capitalist entities do not destroy competition through monopolization of markets. Anti-trust laws are written to prevent monopolies.
Market winners continually try to fix the game in their favor. They grow so powerful and so large they are deemed economically immortal (too big to fail). They are made into “gods” who have their own games they play way above mere mortals who must struggle below and sift the fallen scraps for paltry rewards, which is what real trickle-down looks like. The “gods” (masters of the universe) have the resources to purchase politicians who work for their benefit both in and out of office. The professional politicians are either agents of preserving one form or another of the status quo while in office or they are lobbyists directly representing the “gods” and their business entities. The whole game takes place in the economic equivalent of very exclusive fraternity houses. No mere mortals need apply, unless you are a genius who can make one of the “gods” some real money.
America, alas, has become like Ancient Greece except the “gods” are real rather than imagined. The “gods” actually do control the lives of the masses and limit their growth by failing to keep the economic game open. Instead, the masses are given unsustainable entitlements and then blamed for not playing the game from which they have been excluded by the very blamers. The “gods” invest less and less in their less fortunate compatriots, export their jobs, and then blame the losers for not taking responsibility for the outcome.
Of course there are many companies that have chosen names from the time of Ancient Greece. There is Elysium Wealth Management, Centaur Pharmaceuticals, Hercules Incorporated, Hermes Financial Group, Amazon, Atlas Van Lines, and Delphi Energy, to name a few. However, the real titans of the business world today have more mundane names such as General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Goldman-Saks.
Yes, the masses were told by the minions of the “gods” that they, too, could have a piece of the American Dream if they bought a house with a sub-prime mortgage they could ill afford, but that failure is blamed on the duped buyers under the rubric of caveat emptor. They should have known better. Meanwhile the “gods” made out like bandits.
Now the Tea Party may look like a rebellion orchestrated by a segment of the masses, but it is actually a false rebellion orchestrated by the “gods” to convince the masses that they, the masses, are to blame for their problems. It’s another neat trick the “gods” have played on mere mortals.
The American “gods” warn that America could go the way of modern Greece if drastic austerity measures are not taken when, in fact, America has been acting out a modern day version of ancient Greek mythology: the “gods” always win. Now maybe we mere mortals will awaken to confront the duplicity and hypocrisy of the “gods” and send them all to Hades, otherwise known as Federal Court. But that possibility is remote as long as the “gods” and their political minions keep our attention on that unsustainable national debt which, according to the “gods” is the result of too much indulgence in entitlements for the masses.
As Francis Bacon once said, “Of great riches there is no real use, except in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.”
The elite in Washington, which includes both parties, have offered two scenarios for recovery. The Obama recovery plan includes a carrot-stick approach with tax incentives to stimulate small business and the loss of tax loopholes for the rich. The Republicans have nothing but carrots for the rich and sticks for the downtrodden. Their message to the poor is grab hold of your bootstraps, pull them up, and that gesture will pull you up as well. It’s a neat trick, like smoke and mirrors, and costs nothing. It also does nothing but leave the poor further behind and out of the running for the American Dream.
Government’s role in good times is to act as referee in the game of capitalism. In bad times it needs to act as re-distributor of wealth and initiator of play. Bad times are like end-games in Monopoly. There are no more properties to buy; there are no more hotels to place; the game is in the hands of the winner; the game is over, and it is time to start a new game, a new beginning. The meaning is in the journey to Park Place, not in sitting there at end-game.
Imagine an NFL season where all the top players are concentrated in one team. There would be no season. The sport would die. The results would be so predictable no one would subscribe. It is the uncertainty that makes the NFL vibrant. On any given day, any team might beat anyone else. There are mechanisms in place to assure competition. If we are so committed to competition in that arena, why are we so hesitant to foster it in our economy? Why do we not have strong mechanisms in place to ensure good competition in the marketplace?
The answer is capitalists try to eliminate competition. They do not thrive on it. A famous capitalist named John D. Rockefeller once proclaimed that competition is a sin. It therefore is up to government to make sure that capitalist entities do not destroy competition through monopolization of markets. Anti-trust laws are written to prevent monopolies.
Market winners continually try to fix the game in their favor. They grow so powerful and so large they are deemed economically immortal (too big to fail). They are made into “gods” who have their own games they play way above mere mortals who must struggle below and sift the fallen scraps for paltry rewards, which is what real trickle-down looks like. The “gods” (masters of the universe) have the resources to purchase politicians who work for their benefit both in and out of office. The professional politicians are either agents of preserving one form or another of the status quo while in office or they are lobbyists directly representing the “gods” and their business entities. The whole game takes place in the economic equivalent of very exclusive fraternity houses. No mere mortals need apply, unless you are a genius who can make one of the “gods” some real money.
America, alas, has become like Ancient Greece except the “gods” are real rather than imagined. The “gods” actually do control the lives of the masses and limit their growth by failing to keep the economic game open. Instead, the masses are given unsustainable entitlements and then blamed for not playing the game from which they have been excluded by the very blamers. The “gods” invest less and less in their less fortunate compatriots, export their jobs, and then blame the losers for not taking responsibility for the outcome.
Of course there are many companies that have chosen names from the time of Ancient Greece. There is Elysium Wealth Management, Centaur Pharmaceuticals, Hercules Incorporated, Hermes Financial Group, Amazon, Atlas Van Lines, and Delphi Energy, to name a few. However, the real titans of the business world today have more mundane names such as General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Goldman-Saks.
Yes, the masses were told by the minions of the “gods” that they, too, could have a piece of the American Dream if they bought a house with a sub-prime mortgage they could ill afford, but that failure is blamed on the duped buyers under the rubric of caveat emptor. They should have known better. Meanwhile the “gods” made out like bandits.
Now the Tea Party may look like a rebellion orchestrated by a segment of the masses, but it is actually a false rebellion orchestrated by the “gods” to convince the masses that they, the masses, are to blame for their problems. It’s another neat trick the “gods” have played on mere mortals.
The American “gods” warn that America could go the way of modern Greece if drastic austerity measures are not taken when, in fact, America has been acting out a modern day version of ancient Greek mythology: the “gods” always win. Now maybe we mere mortals will awaken to confront the duplicity and hypocrisy of the “gods” and send them all to Hades, otherwise known as Federal Court. But that possibility is remote as long as the “gods” and their political minions keep our attention on that unsustainable national debt which, according to the “gods” is the result of too much indulgence in entitlements for the masses.
As Francis Bacon once said, “Of great riches there is no real use, except in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.”
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
A Business Decision
I keep hearing the expression “It was a business decision” and have begun wondering how the expression came to be. I know “a business decision” is almost never good news for workers. I have yet to hear it used when describing a plan to hire more people. That usually occurs under the rubric of “business plan,” not “business decision.”
“A business decision” appears to be a euphemism much the same as water closet, powder room, or rest room is used to describe a room with a toilet. The term “business decision” is a way to gloss over the harsh reality of firings or layoffs the way “powder room” softens the harsh reality of defecation or urination.
“Downsizing” is another term used by management to describe the same process, but it carries a description or forecast of what the move involves, so it is a bit closer to the truth.
What all of these euphemisms do to one degree or another is lessen the harshness of the message for the purveyor more than the receiver. If we call job loss the product of “downsizing” or a “business decision,” it makes power holders feel more civilized, more removed from the other end of the process that results in job loss. The power end of the chain of command maintains distance through language.
The ultimate example of this is Hitler’s use of the term “final solution” in World War II. Six million Jews met death under the term “solution” which, for the Nazis, even put a positive spin on a horrible atrocity. “Final solution” was the ultimate euphemism, the ultimate gloss over, the ultimate expression of distance from truth.
But euphemism is not the only mechanism by which power “manages” the less powerful painlessly (again, for the deliverer, not the delivered). It also does so through program and principle. For example, the Tea Party is calling for smaller government, the elimination or privatizing of entitlement programs, less regulation of business, and lower taxes. The idea is that free enterprise will be freed up to stimulate economic recovery and growth. The only things holding back a recovery in the U.S. economy is government and its rising debt, according to Tea Party thinking.
The truth is radical surgery on government, entitlements, and current debt would throw the economy into terrible chaos. Even the business community would rather see a gradual reduction in debt and government services over time than a radical upheaval of the status quo. It is about trajectory, not a screeching halt. Business can cope with, even benefit from, an encouraging trajectory for government spending. It cannot cope with uncertainty that either the maintenance or an upheaval of the status quo would bring.
Meanwhile, what about the workers? What about unemployment? Tax rates for the rich have been lower for about a decade, and unemployment is still high. Calling for even lower taxes is the economic equivalent of “blood-letting” if lower taxes have not stimulated the economy to grow since the so-called end of the Great Recession.
The greatest problem for the American worker is “out-sourcing,” another familiar euphemism developed by the business world to soften the harshness of more American job loss. According to the Wall Street Journal:
U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers, have been hiring abroad while cutting back at home, sharpening the debate over globalization's effect on the U.S. economy.
The companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show. That's a big switch from the 1990s, when they added jobs everywhere: 4.4 million in the U.S. and 2.7 million abroad.*
If major powers in the business community are not hiring Americans, who else is going to take up the slack? If the government reduces corporate taxes in the U.S. from 35% to 25%, will corporations hire enough workers to justify the loss of corporate tax revenue? I say let’s give it a try by reducing the corporate tax rate on those corporations that show a significant increase in domestic hiring, thus reversing the trend outlined by the Wall Street Journal. Do it on a corporation by corporation basis.
Until then we the privileged will continue to hear the euphemisms bandied about and drift along inured to the harsh reality of what it is actually like to be unemployed because we the privileged remain removed from the actual fray. We can sit at our computers and send out our verbal drone missives through space and hope they penetrate the best defenses of the dogmatic, agenda-driven extremists who are certain about their solutions, and give them pause to consider the possibility that there are human beings suffering out there in America, who, regardless of principles, need a long-term solution they can earn, embrace, or even endure that puts actual food in their mouths and an actual roof over their heads. “Out-sourcing,” “business decisions,” and “downsizing” will not answer.
*http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704821704576270783611823972.html
“A business decision” appears to be a euphemism much the same as water closet, powder room, or rest room is used to describe a room with a toilet. The term “business decision” is a way to gloss over the harsh reality of firings or layoffs the way “powder room” softens the harsh reality of defecation or urination.
“Downsizing” is another term used by management to describe the same process, but it carries a description or forecast of what the move involves, so it is a bit closer to the truth.
What all of these euphemisms do to one degree or another is lessen the harshness of the message for the purveyor more than the receiver. If we call job loss the product of “downsizing” or a “business decision,” it makes power holders feel more civilized, more removed from the other end of the process that results in job loss. The power end of the chain of command maintains distance through language.
The ultimate example of this is Hitler’s use of the term “final solution” in World War II. Six million Jews met death under the term “solution” which, for the Nazis, even put a positive spin on a horrible atrocity. “Final solution” was the ultimate euphemism, the ultimate gloss over, the ultimate expression of distance from truth.
But euphemism is not the only mechanism by which power “manages” the less powerful painlessly (again, for the deliverer, not the delivered). It also does so through program and principle. For example, the Tea Party is calling for smaller government, the elimination or privatizing of entitlement programs, less regulation of business, and lower taxes. The idea is that free enterprise will be freed up to stimulate economic recovery and growth. The only things holding back a recovery in the U.S. economy is government and its rising debt, according to Tea Party thinking.
The truth is radical surgery on government, entitlements, and current debt would throw the economy into terrible chaos. Even the business community would rather see a gradual reduction in debt and government services over time than a radical upheaval of the status quo. It is about trajectory, not a screeching halt. Business can cope with, even benefit from, an encouraging trajectory for government spending. It cannot cope with uncertainty that either the maintenance or an upheaval of the status quo would bring.
Meanwhile, what about the workers? What about unemployment? Tax rates for the rich have been lower for about a decade, and unemployment is still high. Calling for even lower taxes is the economic equivalent of “blood-letting” if lower taxes have not stimulated the economy to grow since the so-called end of the Great Recession.
The greatest problem for the American worker is “out-sourcing,” another familiar euphemism developed by the business world to soften the harshness of more American job loss. According to the Wall Street Journal:
U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers, have been hiring abroad while cutting back at home, sharpening the debate over globalization's effect on the U.S. economy.
The companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show. That's a big switch from the 1990s, when they added jobs everywhere: 4.4 million in the U.S. and 2.7 million abroad.*
If major powers in the business community are not hiring Americans, who else is going to take up the slack? If the government reduces corporate taxes in the U.S. from 35% to 25%, will corporations hire enough workers to justify the loss of corporate tax revenue? I say let’s give it a try by reducing the corporate tax rate on those corporations that show a significant increase in domestic hiring, thus reversing the trend outlined by the Wall Street Journal. Do it on a corporation by corporation basis.
Until then we the privileged will continue to hear the euphemisms bandied about and drift along inured to the harsh reality of what it is actually like to be unemployed because we the privileged remain removed from the actual fray. We can sit at our computers and send out our verbal drone missives through space and hope they penetrate the best defenses of the dogmatic, agenda-driven extremists who are certain about their solutions, and give them pause to consider the possibility that there are human beings suffering out there in America, who, regardless of principles, need a long-term solution they can earn, embrace, or even endure that puts actual food in their mouths and an actual roof over their heads. “Out-sourcing,” “business decisions,” and “downsizing” will not answer.
*http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704821704576270783611823972.html
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