President Obama's jobs plan was piled on by Republicans as soon as it hit the House floor. "As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, Republicans were critical of the president’s proposals to cut tax breaks for corporate jet owners, big oil companies and the wealthy. Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, dismissed the proposals, saying there was no appetite in Congress for a 'tax increase on job creators.'”
What jobs? What "job creators"? It's estimated that the Great Recession eliminated 2.5 million jobs that are not coming back... jobs that have gone overseas (that's where the multi-nationals are creating them) or have been eliminated by increased efficiencies.
Follow the path of the past 60 years and you can see where we are headed, if there is no course change in American policy:
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Read Galbraith's "The New Industrial State" to see what it was like in the 1950s, when there was economic and political equilibrium among Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government. Those were the days when folks, such as my parents, who had survived the Great Depression and WWII, were able to build their own business and their own home and send their kids to college. The top tax rate was 90%. Unions represented one private-sector employee in three. And America prospered!
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Then read Robert Reich's "The Work of Nations," an early 90s book which predicts the proliferation of a class of "symbol manipulators," who are able to prosper in a global marketplace, while the workers in our manufacturing and service sectors languish.
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Finally, read Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat." Little wonder that global supply chain management is the hot new major in our business schools. Galbraith detected a decline in American manufacturing and organized labor. Reich described the globalization trend when it was well underway. Friedman shows us where we've landed... on a flat earth where capital can flow freely, moving jobs like chess pieces around a global Monopoly board in order to maximize corporate profits and personal wealth.
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Why should the wealthy want to create American jobs? Absent patriotism, what incentive is there? Creating the jobs where the wages are the lowest can even be justified by the argument that for those folks it represents a modest rise from the depths of abysmal poverty. No guilt to cause loss of sleep, right?
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