A sort-ofFriday Animation feature--a day late, and not exactly an animation.....
But if you don't ordinarily watch the Daily Show, you might enjoy Jon Stewart's Aug. 15 interview with CNN's money man, Ali Velshi. It's available here: Daily Show with Ali Velsai (after 5 seconds of ads...)
There's a key point worth reiterating. The media, Congress and most of us seem to be treating the Stock Market level as "the" measure of the economy. But folks, most of those assets are owned by a small minority of Americans. Velshi notes that the status of investments generally and of houses in particular, matters to those who own them, so the fate of the stock market and the news about housing foreclosures or home sales is relevant. But there are many in the economy without one or the other or both. What almost everyone needs --except those 'investors' at the very top of the pyramid who own scads of financial assets and don't work for a living--is a job. So if you were to look to one thing as the main 'thermometer of the economy', one that could tell you something about most of the people in the country and how the country was doing generally, it would be the employment rate. (I'd add, also, the wages paid for that employment.)
This of course makes the focus on the artificial debt ceiling even stupider. The debt ceiling 'crisis' was completely manufacturered as something to focus on--with the GOP at best pretending that their 'concern' about the level of US debt was a reflection of their concern about US jobs. But of course limiting US debt doesn't create jobs--it likely diminishes employment prospects but cutting federal (and state) spending. And causing or threatening to cause a US default doesn't create jobs--it merely creates anxiety in the markets and anxiety among employers and business owners who have to think about whether to hire anyone or wait. And cutting US expenditures--especially the kinds of expenditures that the GOP right wants to cut, Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and other things on which ordinary people depend for their very lives--won't create jobs and will decrease jobs while leaving most Americans even more vulnerable. In other words, the radical right is doing all the wrong things.
So Stewart asked what might be done to create jobs? Velshi's answer--if we could only get Congress to focus on the real issue of job creation the way they focused on the bogus issue of the debt ceiling, we might get somewhere. Lots of ideas could be considered, debated, tried and kept or tried and discarded. Two he mentions: easing payroll taxes (gives the poorer workers amongst us more cash in hand for necessities, and that spending helps the economy; gives employers more reason to hire, since they also get to keep the cash from their share of the payroll tax); providing a government guarantee for necessary retraining--for a long enough period to matter-- to retool workers for today's economy (private enterprise could do this too, but won't; government could do it without worrying much about long-term costs, since even a reasonable success rate would essentially put a person who is on the dole pay on the payroll and result in more taxes and more spending and more growth in the economy).
These ideas aren't anything new. We've long known that cutting taxes is not a way to economic growth unless we are talking about the taxes of little people.l And we have long known that getting more spending into the economy creates jobs. Congress just needs to quit mouthing its interest in creating jobs and start intervening in the economy in ways that create jobs. Right now, it's intervening in the economy to kill jobs with austerity cuts that make no sense and the refusal to tax the rich in order to fund programs that will ultimately benefit all of us.
Stewart asks what keeps Congress from this kind of priority-centered focus and Velshi answers what we all are beginning to know. Decades of preaching that 'the government is the problem'. As I've noted here often, most of what is wrong today can be traced to Ronald Reagan and his naive views about government and the 'free market' policies favoring big business and the rich that he pushed--deregulation, militarization, privatization, and tax cuts. These policies have justified a miserly attitude that is determined to cut government at whatever cost while protecting the lifestyles of the few ultra-rich at the top of the pyramid. In some areas of the country, people elected ideologues determined to impose this view on everybody--determined to play hard-line politics to satisfy their constituents, even at the cost of the good of the country. So an era of radical right economic terrorism is now underway.
About a week ago, I watched the PBS News Hour interview with the Norwegian Foreign Minister discussing the disaster they had just experienced, where scores of their brightest children were gunned down by a hate-filled terrorist. It was so refreshing to hear candid answers to questions, a willingness to say what might not be popular in some quarters--"we are a more diverse nation"--all with a calmness and frankness that convinced you that you could have a reasonable conversation about controversial policy issues even if you disagreed with the man on most of them. How rare that seems now, in this country, is telling of the level of insanity to which our political debate has fallen.
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