At this point, Republican politicians are beginning to sound almost like wind-up toys when they complain about job-killing taxes and regulations that keep businesses from hiring. The media should at least do the Republicans and the public the courtesy of attempting to discern if these complaints make any sense. (McClatchy gets high marks for this effort.)
If the charges are true, then there are logical implications that can be explored. The media should be taking the time to see whether the evidence is consistent with Republican claims.
The tax side of the story is pretty simple. The Republicans are making things up.
We still have the Bush-era tax rates in effect. The wealthy are paying a smaller share of their income in taxes than at any point since the Great Depression. The tax rate on corporate profits is also hovering near a post-Depression low.
Some of the more inventive Republicans may claim that it is fear of higher taxes in the future that discourages hiring, but this doesn't fly either. There is a huge amount of turnover in the labor market, especially in sectors like health care, retail and restaurants.
Even if employers were convinced that higher tax rates in 2013 and beyond would make it unprofitable to have more workers; that would hardly be a reason not to hire workers today. It's a safe bet that ordinary turnover would allow them to reduce their workforce to the desired level long before the tax rates returned to their Clinton-era levels.
Of course we created 3 million jobs a year from 1996-2000. This makes it difficult to claim the Clinton-era tax rates would destroy jobs.
The regulation part of the story isn't much stronger. It is not easy to find the flood of onerous regulations coming from the Obama Administration. The health care bill is the one Republicans most often mention. This will put additional restrictions on insurers and also require firms with more than 50 workers to either provide insurance directly or to pay a fee to contribute to their employees' health care costs.
This one suffers from the same problem as the fear of taxes story. Suppose employers fear that the higher burden imposed by the bill will be a big cost when they first take effect in 2014. Why would this matter for hiring in 2011?
Furthermore, most large firms already meet the law's requirement since they provide insurance to their workers now, and most small businesses are not close to the 50 person cutoff where the regulation takes effect. Why would these firms be constrained in their hiring by the ACA?
If anything, the ACA promises substantial cost-saving to many large firms, since Republican economists have been maintaining that companies will dump their employees on the exchanges created under the ACA. If they believe this employee dumping story, then this means companies will be looking forward to big savings when the law kicks in. Obamacare should then be leading to a big surge in hiring.
At the very least, if ACA is the big bad job-killing regulation that is scaring employers then we should see its biggest impact on the employers most directly affected. This would be either large firms that do not currently provide insurance or alternatively firms that are near the 50 employee cutoff that would be subject to the law's requirements if they crossed the 50 worker threshold. Is there any evidence that these firms have curtailed investment and hiring? If the Republicans believed their "job killing" claims then they should have mountains of it.
It is also worth remembering that if firms would otherwise be hiring, but are prevented from doing so because of fears of taxes and regulation, then we should expect them to be hiring more temps and to increase the hours of their existing workforce. If this is happening, it sure isn't showing up in the data. Average weekly hours worked actually declined in the August data, and they are still below the pre-recession level.
The same is true of temp employment. Job growth in this sector has been stagnant for months and is nowhere near its pre-recession level.
These are the sorts of things that reporters should be looking at in assessing the claims of job-killing taxes and regulation. This is not a he said/she said. These are claims about the economy that can be verified.
Tens of millions of people are suffering from this downturn. It's not fun and games. Reporters have a job here. The reporters that just copy down outlandish claims by politicians without making any effort to verify them should switch places with the one of the unemployed who would like to work for a living.
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But won't.
Because, as Jon Stewart has successfuly pointed out, the media is too lazy to get up and do their jobs properly without having to chase big shiny objects they think is important to the public.
So people making $35,000 a year think they're rich, because otherwise they'd think they were poor, and therefore evil. Which means they identify fervently with people making a billion dollars a year. And journalists do nothing to disabuse them of this idea, preferring to talk about 'reforming' 'entitlements' that parasitic poor folk (and the elderly, and school children, and veterans) are 'enjoying.'
The low-information people most journalists are playing to see an immense gulf between rich and poor, and imagine they're much closer to the rich -- although they're nearly penniless. Why don't journalists do the work to explain reality to them? Because the journalists themselves believe they're one scoop away from being rich themselves. They suffer from precisely the same logical fallacy.
It also demonstrates in very clear terms why throwing the recovery into the hands of the private sector will not fix things any time soon. Supply side economics is kind of like a black hole. Eventually the consolidation of wealth results in a situation like we have here - the people that drive most of the economy (i.e., consumers) have had their wealth transferred to the top and demand dies.
- Deficits spiked w/each republican president; went down under democratic ones.
From US govt spending.com
http://tinyurl.com/42n2pcl
- Taxes're lower w/Obama. We should be in a boom according to trickle down.
http://tinyurl.com/3sbnwss
Reagan raised taxes on the rich:
http://tinyurl.com/2ew3hml
1995-2006 saw the biggest bubble blown since the Great Depression. The bill that ultimately repealed Glass Steagall was introduced in the Senate by Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and in the House by Jim Leach (R-Iowa) in 1999. This regulation dismantling was an abomination. Clinton should never have signed it.
The housing market was in a normal high part of its cycle when Bush gave this infamous speech regarding housing in ’02 which turned a normal cycle into a bubble of epic proportions:
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/09/24/2002-bushs-speech-to-the-white-house-conference-on-increasing-minority-homeownership/
The deregulation of the banking industry and the juicing of the housing market has a direct line to what we’re experiencing now.
As long as the U.S. continues upon its path of plutocracy and financial fraud, there is no political solution which is being offered which will rectify this degradation. If globalization is continued to be praised as the solution to our national needs, concerning wealth, earnings, employment, etc, we as citizens can expect nothing but more of this deprivation and evisceration of what was once a productive nation.
Truly a radical shift must take place where the citizens are restored as the primary reason for representative government of the people. The nature of our corrupted system provides no succor for the plebe, it acts only to suppress the citizenry in favor of the super citizens, those big people, corporations.
The employment gained in infrastrucÂture repair, would indeed employ many over a lengthy period of time, and the wages would indeed stimulate, it in the end would end and the jobs will disappear as soon as the funding or the project ends.
The true long term employment of a vast segment of our society has been off shored with the explicit complicity of our own government at the behest of multinatioÂnal corporatioÂns. Welcome to the plutocratiÂc age. What the U.S. once was it will never be again until a radical solution is imposed, one which restores the primacy of the citizen in his own governanceÂ.
FACT: HE FAILED!
It all sounds so familiar...less regulation, less taxes. You tell me what went wrong under B/C then?
So the question is how do we get the truths out?