This article has right goal, but terrible policies. Raising taxes and spending is suicide. Raise tariffs, end outsourcing, offshoring and illegal immigration, and the problems will melt away. Yes, it really is that simple!---rng
from thefairsociety.net
Monday, June 6, 2011
OK all you anti-government libertarians, here’s the dilemma. It’s all well and good to rely on the private sector to provide the jobs, and the income that everyone needs after all to meet their basic needs. But what if the private sector is coming up short – way short?
In fact, some 16 percent of our potential workforce are now unemployed, or under-employed part-timers, or never-employed, some 25 million of us altogether. We are told that there is currently one job opening available for every five job-seekers, half of whom have been unemployed for more than six months.
Republicans with a not-so-hidden agenda tell us that if we cut taxes and government spending, this will solve the problem. We call this chicken poop on our farm, or horse poop. Cutting government spending means cutting jobs – lots of them – and cutting taxes for the wealthy to create jobs has been tried twice before and it didn’t work. Why should it work better this time, in an era of near-record corporate profits, with banks and large companies sitting on cash hordes and investors flocking to put their savings from the Bush era tax cuts into emerging markets? Our income tax burden, already the lowest in the industrialized world, is not the problem.
The root of the problem is weak domestic demand in a seriously wounded economy, with the housing bust still dragging down the private sector rather than leading us out of the recession, as in the past. The only way out of this bind is to give the middle class and the poor more income to spend. And if the private sector can’t do the job, we need to begin looking for another alternative. Otherwise we risk long-term economic stagnation coupled with desperate poverty and even starvation. We have to take collective responsibility for this life-and-death dilemma or we will no longer deserve to be called a nation; we will have become a gladiatorial arena in which the losers go to the wall. “Survival of the fittest.”
You may need to hold your nose, but the obvious solution is something that has never een tried,even though the idea has been around ever since the Employment Act of 1946. Let the government be the backstop, the “employer of last resort,” whose role would wax and wane with the need to take up the slack in private sector job-creation.
One successful precedent is the jobs programs in the New Deal era, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that focused on infrastructure improvements and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) that built much of the infrastructure in our national parks. Some of the techniques used in those days, like requiring the workers to send most of their earnings home to their families, would help to spread the economic benefits today as well.
Who is going to pay for this? Let’s start with the bankers who got us into this mess then got away scot free and are now enriching themselves again with million-dollar bonuses while furiously lobbying to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. Or how about those corporate CEO’s whose compensation packages now average some 320 times that of their workers (compared with 20 times as much in the 1950s)?
There is no lack of useful jobs that could be created – starting with re-hiring laid off teachers and health care workers. What is lacking is the vision and the will.
In fact, some 16 percent of our potential workforce are now unemployed, or under-employed part-timers, or never-employed, some 25 million of us altogether. We are told that there is currently one job opening available for every five job-seekers, half of whom have been unemployed for more than six months.
Republicans with a not-so-hidden agenda tell us that if we cut taxes and government spending, this will solve the problem. We call this chicken poop on our farm, or horse poop. Cutting government spending means cutting jobs – lots of them – and cutting taxes for the wealthy to create jobs has been tried twice before and it didn’t work. Why should it work better this time, in an era of near-record corporate profits, with banks and large companies sitting on cash hordes and investors flocking to put their savings from the Bush era tax cuts into emerging markets? Our income tax burden, already the lowest in the industrialized world, is not the problem.
The root of the problem is weak domestic demand in a seriously wounded economy, with the housing bust still dragging down the private sector rather than leading us out of the recession, as in the past. The only way out of this bind is to give the middle class and the poor more income to spend. And if the private sector can’t do the job, we need to begin looking for another alternative. Otherwise we risk long-term economic stagnation coupled with desperate poverty and even starvation. We have to take collective responsibility for this life-and-death dilemma or we will no longer deserve to be called a nation; we will have become a gladiatorial arena in which the losers go to the wall. “Survival of the fittest.”
You may need to hold your nose, but the obvious solution is something that has never een tried,even though the idea has been around ever since the Employment Act of 1946. Let the government be the backstop, the “employer of last resort,” whose role would wax and wane with the need to take up the slack in private sector job-creation.
One successful precedent is the jobs programs in the New Deal era, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that focused on infrastructure improvements and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) that built much of the infrastructure in our national parks. Some of the techniques used in those days, like requiring the workers to send most of their earnings home to their families, would help to spread the economic benefits today as well.
Who is going to pay for this? Let’s start with the bankers who got us into this mess then got away scot free and are now enriching themselves again with million-dollar bonuses while furiously lobbying to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. Or how about those corporate CEO’s whose compensation packages now average some 320 times that of their workers (compared with 20 times as much in the 1950s)?
There is no lack of useful jobs that could be created – starting with re-hiring laid off teachers and health care workers. What is lacking is the vision and the will.
