Greg Sargeant, On GOP Jobs Plan, an Epic Media Fail, Washington Post (Oct. 18, 2011), comments on something that much of the media has let slip, whether intentionally or due to more exciting openings like Cain's 9-9-9 plan for a substantial tax increase on 84% of Americans.
Here's the heart of his comment.
The question is this: In the view of experts, are both parties making a serious and legitimate contribution to the debate over what to do about a severe national crisis that’s causing suffering among millions and millions of Americans? Or is only one party making a real contribution to that debate?
Obama and the Senate GOP have both introduced jobs plans. In reporting on the Senate plan, many news organizations described it as a “GOP jobs plan.” And that’s fine — Rand Paul said it would create five million of them. But few if any of the same news orgs that amplified the GOP offering of a jobs plan are making any serious effort to determine whether independent experts think there’s anything to it. And independent experts don’t think there’s anything to it — they think the GOP jobs plan would not create any jobs in the near term, and could even hurt the economy. By contrast, they do think the Obama plan would create jobs and lead to growth. (emphasis added)
Why aren’t these facts in every single news story about the ongoing jobs debate? Why aren’t they being broadcast far and wide?
I discussed the McCain-Paul GOP so-called "jobs plan" in a post a few days ago, here. As you will see, the so-called plan is primarily a Reaganomics privatization, deregulation and tax cut agenda that carries out the pro-business, pro-wealth policies of the current 'winner-take-all' politics described by Hacker & Pierson in Winner-Take-All Politics. The GOP is no longer interested in the public good. So it is content proposing policies that will lead to environmental and financial destruction--repealing Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, and most other regulatory protections that have been hard won over the last 5 decades--and the rest of the "shrink the US until you can drown it in a bathtub" approaches that Grover Norquist's Americans for tax Reforms and Stephen Moore's Club for Growth have been writing into legislation for the last few decades more and more successfully, to the detriment of the majority of Americans and the benefit of the wealthy few at the top.
Now, it's worth noting in this context that jobs are down and paychecks for the jobs that are out there are down for most people. Mark Thoma over at Economist's View notes David Cay Johnston's "First Look at US Pay Data: It's Awful" (Oct. 20, 2011).
There were fewer jobs and they paid less last year, except at the very top....
The number of Americans with any work fell again last year, down by more than a half million from 2009 to less than 150.4 million.
... [T]here was a reason voters responded in the fall of 2010 to the Republican promise that if given control of Congress they would focus on one thing: jobs. But while Republicans were swept into the majority in the House of Representatives, that promise has been ignored. ... Instead of jobs, the focus on Capitol Hill is on tax cuts for corporations with untaxed profits held offshore, on continuing the temporary Bush administration tax cuts -- especially for those making $1 million or more - and on cutting federal spending, which mean destroying more jobs in the short run. ...
I'd add--and on cutting the earned benefits that ordinary Americans have worked for, under the extraordinary claim that these workers' "entitlements" have to be cut to bring deficits under control, even while more and more tax cuts are shoveled out for the rich and big corporations to make the deficits bulge even more.
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