Pew Research finds that more than two-thirds of Americans believe that "raising taxes on incomes above $250,000 would help the economy" or "make [no] difference."
This startles agreeably, since GOP pols uniformly huckster the myth of "job creators" creating jobs generally (or only) when they can skirt their taxing duties; by burdening the poor devils with their fair share of the nation's upkeep, government destroys job creation. Furthermore job creators, according to Republican macroeconomics, seem to "create" jobs from removes of fundamental abstraction, and not from the Marxist grime of profitability. (A distressing swath of pols and strategists on the Democratic side commit the identical error whenever they casually reference independently acting "job creators.")
Yet businesspeople are not in the business of creating jobs (except for incompetent nephews). Consumers create jobs, by consuming, and businesses respond, by producing; the greater the aggregate demand, the higher the general employment. The absence of this elementary principle of economics in contemporary political "debate" is astonishing--especially since most Americans, somewhat shockingly, have already filled in the incoherent gap.
One thing I don't see in the lazy media is anyone asking the clods who make this whole job creator argument exactly how tax cuts for corporations and lax regulation does create jobs. What kind of jobs are created? The kind that pay well and support a family with a pension at retirement or low-wage service sector jobs that don't even cover basic expenses? Are the jobs even in this country? And if jobs are outsourced then what do we do with the American workers who just got handed pink slips? Is their only option left to work in some big box store that sells the products they used to make for a cheaper price and much lower quality? Obama's jobs record and Mitt Romney's tax returns aside these are the real questions I never see anyone ask. This is a structural problem thirty years in the making and no one seems to want to discuss it.
Posted by: AnneJ | July 17, 2012 at 12:00 PM
AnneJ...this whole job creation thing has taken on an urban myth quality...much like the trickle down myth of the 80's. You are so right about the lazy media not asking the appropriate questions...but I think that ended back in the 80's also.
Posted by: SueMe | July 17, 2012 at 03:59 PM
AnneJ, sorry, you're making way too much sense to be taken seriously.
Posted by: Jason | July 18, 2012 at 12:11 AM