Friday, January 09, 2009
Yep, Tax Cuts Work
While the GOP engages in yet another (apparently already successful) tax cut blackmail of legislation, let's remind ourselves what nearly eight years of massive tax cuts have gotten us.
The Labor Department reports
And it gets worse. Those job losses in October and November of 2008 were even worse than originally thought.
Instead of using ineffective tax cuts as stimulus, let's invest in education, let's forgive the billions of dollars in student loans, let's build mass transit, let's restore the safety nets that a generation of "supply side" insanity has shredded, and let's invest in providing health care for every single person in this country, and let's invest in other programs that actually improve not only our individual lives, but our collective lives as well.
We can't afford tax cuts. We can't afford to not invest in our country, our states, our cities, our counties, and our townships. Taxes are the way to pay for that investment. The private sector has shown itself (yet again) incapable of providing any kind of sustainable investment in the public good.
And for those who say the government should not be involved in the kinds of investments, well, remember "We the People of the United States, in Order to [. . .] promote the general Welfare [. . .] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Yep, that's a whole lot of "collectivism." Yep, one of the reasons We the People established the current form of government was to promote the general welfare. Taxes spent on education, health care, on infrastructure like mass transit, etc. are one way to promote the general welfare. Tax cuts merely promote narrow individual welfare.
While the GOP engages in yet another (apparently already successful) tax cut blackmail of legislation, let's remind ourselves what nearly eight years of massive tax cuts have gotten us.
The Labor Department reports
in December [. . .] employers shed another 524,000 jobs, the unemployment rate leapt half a percentage point to 7.2 percent
And it gets worse. Those job losses in October and November of 2008 were even worse than originally thought.
The Labor Department also revised its employment reports from October and November, noting that job losses in those months were worse than first reported. Employers rid themselves of 423,000 jobs in October, not the originally reported 320,000, and 584,000 positions in November, not the 533,000 first reported by the BLS.And it gets even worse than that.
While the steep jump in unemployment and mounting job losses grabbed the headlines, there was even more troubling news buried deeper down in the report. The BLS said that the average hourly workweek for production and nonsupervisory jobs had shrunk 0.2 percent to 33.3 hours. That marks the lowest that this number has registered since the government started compiling these statistics in 1964.As the Democratic Congress bends over backwards to satisfy Republican demands for tax cuts let's remind ourselves of how stunningly unsuccessful Republican trumpeted tax cuts have been over the past eight years. Sure people made a lot of money, but nearly all of the money that wasn't hidden away in Swiss or Cayman Island bank accounts or stuffed under some mattress is gone. Oh, and over a million jobs disappeared in two month's time, just for good measure. Somehow, despite the tax cuts to corporations and the super rich, the factories, the call centers, the paper work centers, etc. keep disappearing or being sent off-shore.
Instead of using ineffective tax cuts as stimulus, let's invest in education, let's forgive the billions of dollars in student loans, let's build mass transit, let's restore the safety nets that a generation of "supply side" insanity has shredded, and let's invest in providing health care for every single person in this country, and let's invest in other programs that actually improve not only our individual lives, but our collective lives as well.
We can't afford tax cuts. We can't afford to not invest in our country, our states, our cities, our counties, and our townships. Taxes are the way to pay for that investment. The private sector has shown itself (yet again) incapable of providing any kind of sustainable investment in the public good.
And for those who say the government should not be involved in the kinds of investments, well, remember "We the People of the United States, in Order to [. . .] promote the general Welfare [. . .] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Yep, that's a whole lot of "collectivism." Yep, one of the reasons We the People established the current form of government was to promote the general welfare. Taxes spent on education, health care, on infrastructure like mass transit, etc. are one way to promote the general welfare. Tax cuts merely promote narrow individual welfare.