The single most important aspect of the post election will be jobs. Putting all of America back to work at a living wage is the basic key to having the country work. Think about how things were after WWII.
There is currently a great deal of controversy happening about our economy. The two principle Parties have absolutely opposite ideas about how our economy can be made to work best and there seems to be no middle ground on which they can agree.
The Right wants to cut taxes and wages even as they limit all entitlement programs, a pot into which they appear to throw Social Security, which is definitely not an entitlement. The Left wants to increase wages and certain taxes, especially those on the super wealthy and expand entitlement programs in the areas of health and education.
This is, of course, a broad simplification of the wants of all concerned, but to make sense of it we have to get much deeper into what can be done and what should be done in order to raise our growth rate to at least 4% annually from the 1.5% to 2% at which it now sits.
There is no real point where a clean break that illustrates the contrast between Left and Right on these issues is glaringly apparent with the possible exception of 2008 where the Bush administration ended and the Obama administration began. It was a seminal moment for the American economy. For one of the first times in memory one administration, the Bush disaster, had been handed a surplus by the previous administration. Bush, through a pair of unfinanced wars and the destruction of legislation that kept the ever-unwieldy corporate machine under control, then managed to fritter away the surplus handed to him by Bill Clinton. He thereby create a huge deficit that would continue to grow after he left office and the true, previously hidden, costs of his two illegal wars emerged from the sludge, his coterie of crooks had buried them in.
Facing calamity as he left office, Bush had made one pretty good move. He passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, later known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It set aside $700 billion to buy up bad debt acquired by banks, mostly from the subprime mortgage market. This debt was the result of the relaxation by Bush, of almost all controls on the real estate industry and Wall Street. The banks had run amok, creating a crisis that threatened to crash the market and destroy the economy. It may have been the only thing in eight years in office that the Bush administration did right, but it was far too late to save the loss of trillions of dollars by the American people. And it was, notably aimed at saving our richest institutions not our job market.
What this whole incident did do; was prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism, the financial system on which this country’s economics are based, is incapable of regulating itself. With Glass–Stiegel removed from the picture, American businessmen went crazy, implementing any crooked scheme they could devise, regardless of its legal or moral consequences.
Almost as soon as he took office, Barak Obama passed the Auto Bailout, saving hundreds of thousand of jobs in the auto and related industries. That legislation had a more significant impact on people in general, than did the passing of the EESA. The Auto Bailout saved jobs while Bush’s legislation saved banks and only by association, any jobs. Both were vey important in keeping our economy from crashing beneath that of 1929. The auto industry’s problems had not come, for the most part, from shady activities like the banking industry and Wall Street and they have long since paid back every dollar they received from the government. The banking and real estate industries and Wall Street slithered out of their criminal problems and none of the parties responsible for the illegal activities that got them into trouble seem to have paid. That is something that eventually must be addressed, especially since the banks criminal activities have continued unabated to this day.
Basically the responsibilities and the activities of both the Bush and the Obama administrations point up the differences between the Right and the Left; the ways they view policy along with how and whom they seek to protect in the jungle of American finance.
As has been pointed out ad nausea by Bernie Sanders in his one-note presidential campaign, this is the richest country in the world but only about 1% of our over 300 million population is really able to benefit from it.
There is something radically wrong when a family of four with both parents working still has to resort to food stamps to feed their kids. If you don’t recognize this than you are a major part of the problem. The imbalance of wealth in this country is staggering and while this writer firmly believes that excellence and initiative must be rewarded if we are to continue to excel, it is also clear that there is only so much money that one man can or should spend. The acquisition of more money than is necessary to maintain a normally luxurious lifestyle is despicable greed and has no place in a society that looks to the goals of the merican dream, certainly not while children go hungry and schools fall into disrepair.
This column does not believe in the viability of a true welfare state but it also understands that unmitigated greed is the enemy of human function. Companies like Walmart, which is owned by four of the richest siblings in the world and MacDonald’s which is one of the most profitable corporations on the planet, pay their workers starvation wages and are an affront to any viable model of the capitalist system. Corporate officers who make millions in bonuses and pay the people whose labor enables their profits, $7.25 an hour in places like New York City are disgusting examples of a sub-human species that feeds on those less well off than itself, with no thought as to how they are harming society in general.
The Republicans all talk about the last 8 years of slow growth. They choose to ignore the fact that it was their people that caused that lack of growth when all the big corporations sat on their profits instead of investing them back in growth industries and infrastructure. One ugly example is that five major U.S. companies, Verizon, Bristol-Meyers, Walmart, News Corporation and Johnson & Johnson, stockpiled from 2007 to 2011, nearly $60 billion in cash while cutting over 64,000 jobs. This absolutely puts the lie to the conservative claim that tax breaks, which add money to corporate coffers, will lead to more job creation.
Verizon was the biggest offender, cutting 41,000 of those jobs while its cash holdings and short-term investments grew 311% to $14 billion. They were also a major tax avoider, actually paying negative federal income tax during the period 2008 to 2011 even as they chased after additional tax breaks and forced their union workers to take cuts in health care, retirement funds and other benefits. They were partially restrained when at the end of 2015 their workers struck them forcing a settlement in May of 2016 that returned some of the stolen benefits.
This is the kind of company that, if allowed to continue on its present path will ruin the American economy. It is also proof of the great GOP lie, “regulation is bad for small business.” It’s not regulation, but huge corporations like Verizon that are bad for small business. It’s big corporations like Verizon that bully small businesses and without regulation would force them all out onto the street. Big businesses undercut their own rates to steal customers from small business. They bully smaller businesses off routes, force them away from suppliers, break them with false advertising and when all else fails they refuse to pay bills, knowing that the small businesses, working on slim profit margins, cannot afford to sue them.
The goal, of course, is to eliminate competition. We need regulation to stop this kind of business tactic. Yes, we need to cut back on certain kinds of regulation which are costly for small business and interfere with their ability to compete but none of those costs come close to the legal fees they can incur when trying to fight unregulated corporate competitors. This writer has brought small business into the discussion because it is the twig that starts the bonfire of entrepreneurship. It’s also a huge job creator. But when you need a big employment push you need to go to the industrial segment that best fits the unemployed labor force and for that you have to go to our biggest national need, infrastructure.
It’s hard to see why the Right doesn’t understand the need to refurbish our infrastructure or the obvious fact that such a move will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the precise area that we need them most. Yes, we need to re-educate our work force but that takes time. We need jobs now. But they have to be adequately paid jobs or they don’t solve the problem. Two working parents who cannot afford childcare and still need food stamps to survive is not a solution. It’s just adding to the problem.
So why is such an obvious solution not apparant to the Conservative element in our country? That is a hard question for reasonable men to answer but the ability to reason has never been a qualification for public office. We lean more to personality and bombast, which is how men like Donald Trump can come to the fore. The main reason why Trump has been successful in his GOP primaries is that the establishment of that party has spent the last few decades promising great things to their followers and then delivering those things only to themselves.
The GOP hails small government as if this country were Lichtenstein. The United States is a huge landmass with well over 300 million people living on it. We have the largest, most successful economy in the world, the hugest military and the biggest involvement in foreign policy of any nation of the planet. Does that appear to be a roadmap for small government? Only if one is completely brain dead, or more interested in ones own nefarious goals.
But the Right doesn’t care about the good of the country. Certainly the GOP establishment doesn’t. They are in thrall to huge corporate interests that forever seek more. At a time when our country desperately needs big investment in infrastructure, our corporate barons sit on billions in profits, preferring to put their money in the Market rather than use it to create jobs and benefit the crumbling national infrastructure.
The goal of building our infrastructure and creating jobs must be met. The only current solution appears to be an idea that was floated around several years ago. It involved the government setting up guarantees for all the infrastructure work that needs to be done. The government creating a new WPA or CCC that would be used as a work force on programs assigned to corporate America to finance, but with a government guarantee of profit behind them. This would remove all the excuses used by corporate America to avoid financing the infrastructure that will actually help them maximize their own potential in both the long and short runs. But in order to regenerate that idea we must have the votes in congress and we must have a President that is willing to force that program through.
To move this process along, the government needs to remove all tax incentives for large corporations in every area except infrastructure. The IRS could then replace the lost incentives with one big one, which would create tax incentives to finance infrastructure programs only. This is a radical approach but that’s exactly what is needed at this point. For decades the Right has managed to delay and obfuscate so that our infrastructure is in desperate need of repair and our workers in even more need of good paying jobs that can bring them back to the middle class.
Yes, this is only a short term fix, a program that would last maybe ten years but in the ensuing ten year period when we were rebuilding our infrastructure, we could be educating our labor force to tackle the new kinds of jobs that would be coming on line with all the new technology we are developing. In addition, a large percentage of those in need of the kind of work provided by infrastructure regeneration, would normally be passing out of the labor force through natural attrition. Some of those jobs would naturally phase out while others would be filled, but to a lesser number, by those ill equipped for the work created by modern technology. They would fall, for the most part, to migrant workers and first stage immigrants who would one day become the parents of college graduates. It’s the American way.