To what should be our shared astonishment, the GOP sticks to its one-note theme: tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations are the ONLY means to create new jobs.
In an orchestrated campaign the impudence of which should take our breath away, GOP candidates across the country have spent their time (and a whole lot of corporate-donated cash) pounding this message home, over and over again, without bothering to produce a single real-world example.
Let's be clear. This isn't a matter of dogma (except to GOP acolytes who hope for a long, lucrative career sucking at the corporate pig trough). This is a matter of simple empirical observation. Facts either validate or repudiate the "trickle-down" hypothesis. (I know, in the age of Palin I should say "refudiates," just to connect with some readers, but I remain, stubbornly, in the Reality-Based Community.)
We have a thirty-year track record to test the theory of "trickle-down" Reaganomics. ("Voodoo economics," the man who would become Reagan's own V.P. called it, before surrendering principle to become the second-in-command--if you don't count Alexander Haig.) If tax breaks for corporations and the rich could spontaneously generate new job growth, we should have seen miracles over the last thirty years. Explosions of jobs, increasing wages, happy families (enjoying adequate medical care), happy children (enjoying working public schools) . . . but this is not left-wing utopian rhetoric: this is the delusional drivel on offer from the neoliberal right.
Instead we have seen repeated, consistent proof that given the chance, corporations will (1) "downsize" (fire workers), (2) "out-source" and (3) "relocate" (hiring new workers and moving factories and offices to states or foreign nations with even lower tax rates); (4) lobby Congress--using extravagant budgets no citizens' group can match--for deregulation from basic safety, environmental, product quality, and employee-rights rules; and (5) use massive advertising campaigns to try to convince us that all this is for our own good and that we have no real alternative.
The pro-corporation advertising has been packaged as "news" (Fox), but its fundamental character as blackmail has been made explicit, repeatedly, by think-tanks and corporate CEOs who have alike threatened that "the rich" will simply take "their" money and go to a state with a cheaper tax rate. The threat encompasses both the personal and corporate taxes these skinflint rich will take with them, the jobs they promise to take elsewhere, and the "value added," through sports teams and other benefits, that they purport to bring their inferiors simply by living among us.
If this isn't reality, then I beg the advocates of neoliberal "free-market" ideology to show us a single case in which deregulation and taxpayer subsidies have resulted in significant net job gains.
Can you hear the crickets?
It is long past time we all called the corporate hacks and GOP candidates (to the extent these are different groups) on the nonsense they are trying to peddle among us. First of all, it's not "their" money. They are getting rich from the work that hundreds, thousands, of other people do for them. (Compare the CEO/employee pay ratios in all developed nations and think, really hard, whether you've ever seen a CEO come close to earning the extra dough. Where does that money come from?)
Second, if they really believe the "invisible hand" of the free market produced jobs of its own magic, let them show us the results. Now.
And if it's not that anonymous, miraculous "invisible hand," then it must be the actual wills of living, breathing CEOs and stockholders who could decide, tomorrow--no, tonight--to raise the wages of their employees, guarantee health care, invest in their employees' children's education, and so on.
Why haven't they done so in the thirty years in which their mumbo-jumbo magic has been the dominant economic policy of the land?
Because they know, perfectly well, that it's not true. Because no responsible CEO or board member is about to cut into their precious profit margins by paying decent wages. Because it's actually cheaper for them to spend money waging campaigns against workers than paying workers what they're worth.
The cant of the Republican Party is breathtakingly shameful--the sort of shame one senses in one's nose when one stands downwind from of a gigantic corporate-farm manure lagoon. To believe this cant, thirty years on into the experiment, isn't an act of faith: it's an act of stupidity.
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