The Mittster is at it again, only this time it wasn’t yesterday or today, this time it was back in May at a private get together of a few billionaire friends where Mitt thought he could say what ever came into his head without danger of his mean spirited thoughts being overhead by those he sought to demean.
Turns out that the key number was 47%, a segment of the population that Mitt was sure was going to vote for Obama, mainly because they were the kind of people that Mitt doesn’t want inhabiting his America. He claims, and if his numbers are indeed accurate, it will be one of the few times in this campaign that he has allowed the truth to escape his lips, that this 47% is made up of people who are living on the government dole; that they are losers who think that the government owes them a living and that they have no desire to work or pay taxes or contribute in any way. It’s a really interesting position for a man who wants to be president of all the people.
The 47%, according to Mitt are those people who are receiving some kind of government assistance or who are not paying taxes. If you take his numbers at face value you must deal with the fact that this is a huge increase since Obama has taken office. This makes the Mittster very happy, mainly because he is so all-encompassingly uncomprehending of why this situation exists.
The first thing Mitt has to understand is that none of these people’s daddy’s gave them a company to run. The second is that a great percentage of them had been gainfully employed before the Bush team, employing the same principles that Mitt wants to resuscitate, all but destroyed our economy and threw these hard working citizens out onto the street. The third thing that Mitt must understand is that many of these people who are sharing, in what he considers, government largess, are currently employed by companies like Staples, Mitt’s shining legacy, or Walmart’s; companies that pay their employees, a munificent sum of $7 to $9 an hour which totals out to $14,560 to $18,720 a year. That’s less money than Mitt uses to fuel his plane for a trip to visit his money in the Cayman Islands and it’s supposed to support a family. Where, in Cambodia?
Of course these people need food stamps. At $360 a week they are a necessity. $360 won’t cover the dinner tab with wine, for Mitt and Anne at your average high end restaurant, so how could it be expected pay the rent, the heating, the electric, medical bills, clothes for the kids and gas for the car and still leave something for food. Get a clue Mitt. Just cause a guy works hard or tries to work hard doesn’t mean, in today’s marketplace, that he is actually gong to earn enough to raise his family with even the minimum necessities of life. Not in this country, not now, not when short sighted, corporate oligarchs are hogging all the money and bleeding their workers dry. This is what’s wrong with America today, that wasn’t wrong when I was a kid or even when you were.
This change, brought about by greedy, clueless, silver spoon, pampered rich kids, men with no understanding of what it means to break their back for pennies and still not be able to give their families what they need, is what is driving this country into the toilet.
Sure, we’re still a great country, but we won’t be for long if we continue to allow this kind of know nothing leadership and money before people morality, to infect everything that has made America great.
The far Right and the Tea Party clamor for a return of the good old days but they refuse to see that it is the leadership of men like Romney, and Bush before him, that is clearly preventing it. The good old days saw a balance of capital and labor that allowed entrepreneurs to become millionaires, while at the same time allowing their workers to enjoy full, meaningful lives on the wages they received from one job with a forty-hour week. That situation hasn’t disappeared completely but it is fast slipping away.
If you can’t feed your family on a full time paycheck from a company like Staples or Walmart then something is wrong and that thing has to be changed. I am stunned at the shortsighted greed of these companies and many like them, that fail to understand, that in taking those last extra crumbs from their workers they are destroying their own consumer base.
Walmart’s may love having most of their merchandise made in China but they have to sell most of it here and if there is no consumer base with any money in their pockets, who the hell is going to buy their crap?
This is not a rant against capitalism, in which I firmly believe. This is a rant against corporate greed, stupidity and shortsightedness that is currently infecting and killing our economy.
A good friend asked me at a poker game the other night, why I seemed to feel that corporations weren’t entitled to make a profit. I told him that they were, that they had to in order to stay in business but that I felt that excess profits taken at the expense of their workers was criminal and immoral; that paying a worker $9 an hour while paying a CEO a $9 million bonus was wrong and bad for the country. That kind of inequality is what is causing Romney’s 47% and that figure will only go up if he is elected in November.
Romney’s statement about the 47% also included those who do not pay taxes. What planet does this guy live on? This is probably the dumbest part of that statement because everyone pays taxes. They may not be income taxes if one doesn’t make enough money and who would owe taxes on $18, 720 a year, but even with that minute salary, that worker will pay payroll, social security and Medicare taxes. He will also pay sales taxes on everything he buys in stores and at the pump, tolls, property taxes, license fees and a litany that goes on and on. And with that rotten salary those taxes take a much bigger bite out of is income, even with a higher rate, than they do from the guy who makes a half a million a year. It’s just a matter of fairness but if Romney doesn’t understand this principal than maybe he’s just not bright enough to be president in 2013 or ever.
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A Simple Question
Speaking of taxes, I want to ask you a very simple question. Would you rather have a job or lower tax rates? Now a great many of you will be tempted to answer, “I already have a job so I want lower tax rates.” But then you become one of those sleazy politicians or their handlers who when asked a simple question, evade and obfuscate. It’s an either or, not a one plus, question.
Some of you can legitimately say, I’d rather have a lower tax rate. But that only means you don’t have or need a job because you have a huge, sustaining, portfolio. Let’s see; that would put you up in the 1% wouldn’t it.
For the rest of us the answer is easy. We want a job because without one our tax rate is irrelevant. If you want a job, if you need a job, forget the rhetoric coming from the right or the left when you make your voting decision this November. Just look at history. That’s right, look at history because neither of the parties is espousing anything that hasn’t been done before and all you have to do is look at the results of previous attempts to fix the economy to see where you should be voting in this election.
If there are two incontrovertible conclusions that can be drawn from looking back at history they are: first that austerity and lowering taxes on the rich has never worked. The only place that money has ever trickled down in this leaky economic construction is into the pockets of yacht builders and there just aren’t many jobs there, and second that our economy has always reached its highest levels when our tax rates are at their highest levels. The Eisenhower years, the 1960’s & 1970’s and the Clinton years were all great times for this country and they were also times when our tax rates were through the roof. We don’t have to return to the Eisenhower rates, that reached into the stratosphere, but we should go back, at least to the rates of the Clinton years, which would put us on a path back to job creation and prosperity
The bottom line is that we must increase taxes, especially on the rich because in this economic climate we just can’t cut assistance programs, at least not until we are able to put more people back to work. How do we do that? By the government creating jobs where the private sector can’t. How do we finance those jobs? We borrow. Right now, because of the vanishing interest rates, is the best time we have ever had to borrow. The big objection against government borrowing has always been that paying interest is like burning money. Well, the rates are so low right now that we would be paying almost no interest so now’s the time. We need an immense transfusion of money into the infrastructure and if we make it, not only will we create jobs, we will end up with a modern infrastructure and not the crumbling mess we have now.
Paying additional taxes will help to support the assistance that will be necessary until the jobs are there. Sure, there are some people taking advantage of our assistance programs. That’s human nature but all those people put together probably don’t add up to anything near what Romney scams, perfectly legally, on his taxes every year.
In addition, tax increases on the rich will help to pay down the national debt, thereby eliminating those nasty interest charges incurred when the rate was much higher than it is today.
One last thought. Another Republican friend approached me with the admonition that increasing tax rates on the rich would squelch the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that has made this country great. That’s pure fantasy. The fact is that most innovation and entrepreneurial action, even though it often results in riches, doesn’t come from the rich. Most innovation comes from small businesses run by young people with good ideas and from government research. Entrepreneurs are risk takers looking for a score score; sometimes they get rich, sometimes they crap out. This is not the spirit by which corporations are run. The men who run corporations are bean counters, not entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the ones who started those corporations but the same spirit of restlessness that enabled them to take the chance that led to riches keeps them from hanging around and doing the grunt labor it takes to run a huge business. These are the guys who should be paying the big taxes. Their doing so won’t slow innovation or entrepreneurship in the least.
I’ll ask the question again. Do you want a job or do you want lower tax rates? You screwed it up in 2000 and 2004. Don’t screw it up again.