Comrade Bush Uses State Apparatus to Advance Interests of Glorious Proletariat!
As I've said before, I'm not one to congratulate/blame a president for the job gains/losses on his watch, but wouldn't it be ironic if this were Comrade Bush's economic legacy?
posted by Mockrates at 4:16 PM
2 Comments:
I won't even pretend to know whether tax cuts or tax increases are particularly good or bad for job creation. I've enjoyed my tax cuts, which have over the past 6 years decreased my total tax bill by quite a bit, and by percentage almost certainly more than most rich people (I know this to be a Republican talking point, but in my case it's a very accurate one, my taxes have gone down about 2500 dollars compared to what the same income would have been taxed in 2000, and my total tax bill now is about 3800 dollars (so I'm not particularly doing the chardonnay, even with the free house which I like very much).
The real story, in my opinion, is not that Bush's tax cuts didn't do all they were promised to (obviously they haven't, and really, does anything a politician promises ever actually happen?), but rather that our economic system greatly discourages one parent staying home with their child, as it takes about 2.5 unskilled wage earners today to equal what one could have made in 1950, in real wages. There was a time in US history where hard work actually could (and often did), get you ahead, whereas today it is patently obvious that the harder you work, the less you get paid (consier CNA's changing bedpans compared to Nurse Adminstrators, not to knock the latter).
So, OK, jobs are not exactly humming, but things began to suck long before this, and will into the future, and those who work too hard (I'm not one of them:) to barely make ends meet don't even factor into the equation of job creation/unemployment.
I would like to see the debate be far more centered on quality of life than employment.
"I would like to see the debate be far more centered on quality of life than employment."
Me too. How do we do that?
I think the essence of the problem has to be this: for about the last 40 years, people at the top extreme of the income bracket have siphoned off nearly all of the returns on the productivity increases that have occurred over the same period. Most of those increases have come as a result of technology and having better trained workers, and many fewer have come as a result of foreign trade/moving production offshore.
So how do people in the middle and lower middle of the bracket assert their claims over those productivity increases? Unionization? Redistribution through the tax system? Imposing trade barriers? None of these things is acceptable to Republicans, but then again Republicans have no suggestions except for cutting taxes, which, given the current tax levels, doesn't appear to do anything to either create jobs or raise wages (that's assuming that Republicans who call for tax cuts are sincere in their concern for growing income inequality).
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