More Cat Food Commission
From the litter box of the MSM –
Dan Eggen of the Washington Post tells us that Many deficit commission staffers paid by outside groups. Can you say “lobbyist wrote this turkey”? I thought you could.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times crunches the numbers of The Hijacked Commission: “Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class.”
Same as it ever was – Reagan supply side / trickle down / voodoo economics in the hallowed spirit of the Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™ – the perverse idea that leads one to conclude that as tax rates approach zero, tax revenues approach infinity.
As an added bonus I include yet another person with real world experience, Dave Johnson, explaining Businesses Do Not Create Jobs. Maybe his version will help people understand what Badtux, Steve Bates, and I don’t seem to be able to get across – it is all about DEMAND. You don’t hire people unless you have the demand to justify doing it.
On a related note, I saw that Cisco Systems has taken a hit because of the austerity budgets of state and local governments. With about a 10% cut in demand, they will probably be laying people off in manufacturing.
4 comments
Silly question here. Why cat food?
This fight over Social Security goes back to its founding in the 1930s. The Cat Food reference is one of the old arguments about what cutting Social Security would mean – seniors forced to eat pet food because they wouldn’t have the money to buy real food.
This is an ancient label that reappears every time the Republicans try to steal from the Social Security trust fund.
Thanks for the link to Dave Johnson. A nice summary of the actual process of meeting demand and the role of government in balancing profits and the needs of society.
On another note. Unless Cisco has changed their business model in the last couple of years since I consulted with them they are actually a ‘virtual’ companyin many repsects. They don’t do any of the their own manufacturing or actually maintain any inventory. Everything except engineering, marketing etc. are done by a third party. Regardless, if they took a hit their vendors will take a hit and the net will be lost jobs.
Oh, I assume the workers will probably be at some Asian company no one ever heard of, just like the company that actually makes the iPhone. Most surviving companies in the US are nothing more than a management shell at a corporate headquarters with all of the actual functions of the company outsourced to the lowest bidder.