Try It, You’ll Like It
Badtux gets his tail feathers in a knot over ignorant proposals to create jobs. The people making them keep showing up on the op-ed pages and the talk shows, but none of them has ever been in business. They honestly don’t understand how a business works.
If you want more jobs, you have to create demand. The easiest way of doing that is with a sizable stimulus package that begins to repair the neglected US infrastructure.
If you are in business, you hire the number of people necessary to meet the demand you have. You don’t hire more people unless you have a good reason to believe they are necessary to meet increased demand.
You don’t hire people based on taxes or wages, you hire based on demand. If you aren’t selling anything, it doesn’t make a bit of difference how many tax breaks you will get, or how cheap labor is, you are losing money.
If people don’t get back to work, the deficit will get worse as tax revenues continue to fall. If people go back to work the deficit will decline as revenues increase. You have to spend money to make money. Currently the only entity capable of spending the kind of money necessary to kick start the economy is the Federal government. A spending freeze will make matters worse and shut the economy down. We know this, because we have been through it before.
2 comments
To say that I am unhappy about the extent to which President Obama has disappeared into a Washington Bubble Universe in which unicorns are real, cotton candy grows on trees, 0% Treasury rates are crowding out private investment, and the printing press was never invented, is an understatement. The primary method of our political discourse has become to baldly state nonsense as if it were handed down from God Himself, with no data allowed to interfere with this “truth”, and Obama, with all the spine of a jellyfish, has proven himself inadequate to the task of challenging this “common wisdom” such as “tax cuts create jobs” that is, in fact, utter balderdash with absolutely no factual basis. Taxes account for under 2% of the expenses of the average business, thanks to the fact that businesses are allowed to deduct all of their expenses from their pretax income (unlike us peons who must pay taxes on all our expenses other than a few deductions oh so generously casually tossed our way like doubloons tossed from a Mardi Gras float), and they simply are not a factor and all Obama is doing by passing yet more tax cuts is further knee-capping a budget already gutted by the Bush tax cuts — tax cuts which he is, inexplicably, also keeping, yet more Republican economic policy which he is adopting as his own.
I did not vote for Obama in the November election believing that he was going to be a liberal. I had repeatedly pointed out to his liberal supporters during the primary that their man was not a liberal, there wasn’t a single liberal policy proposal anywhere on his web site, it was all conservative twiddling around the margins kind of stuff, not the sort of bold things that they were hoping for. I figured, however, that Obama was at least non-delusional, which could not be said for John McCain, and that is the best we could expect. Apparently, however, I was wrong about even that.
– Badtux the Tailfeather-knotted Penguin
.-= last blog ..Spoon! =-.
Obama and his economic team are a total disaster. They are shorting the country.
I guess they require a re-run of the 1930s to figure out how wrong they are, because nothing else seems to get through the surface of the bubble.
Of all of the problems I had doing business in California, taxes didn’t even rise to noise level. I would have loved to pay massive taxes, because it would have meant that I was making huge bucks. San Diego county was a much bigger PITA than the state or the Feds, because the whackos who got elected would change the fricking rules. I didn’t really care all that much what the rules were, only that they stayed consistent, so I could factor them into bids.