The GOP's "Job Creators" Are Really the Job Destroyers

The Republicans and the Tea Partiers like to talk about tax breaks, tax loopholes, and subsidies for the wealthy in the same sentences as the word 'jobs', and 'job creators'.

That would be the corrupt wealthy who like to buy themselves corrupt right wing politicians, and who pay for the extensive deluding of the right wing base through propaganda.

I am getting to the point where if I hear the words 'job creator' one more time, I might scream out loud from the extreme cognitive dissonance.  Saying these are job creators does not make them so.

The Right wing has controledf the House of Representatives since January of this year.  In December, they negotiated for an extension of the Bush Tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, including the UNPAID tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest 2%, directly causing an increase in the deficit by the decrease in revenue that would have otherwise occurred.  Obama had already agreed to continue the tax cuts for all but the top 2% of the wealthiest, those who had disproportionately benfited for the preceding 9 years.  Insisting on 'UNPAID for' tax cut extensions, from those who have subsequently demanded even disaster relief be paid for by cuts in other spending, is purely, clearly, undeniably HYPOCRITICAL.

From 2001 to 2008 of the Bush administration, during there were also Republican majorities in Congress, 2.1 million jobs  were created, and by the end of the Obama administration, far more jobs than that were also lost.  That era of Republian policies were reflected in some of the slowest economic growth, and the fewest jobs created - less than the population growth - since World War II. 

Worse, there was a decline in manufacturing, and an increase in the number of low paying jobs, not high paying jobs.

In the preceding 8 years of the Clinton administration, there was a growth of 22.2 million jobs.  That was job growth WITHOUT those lower wealthy tax rates, and WITH largely Democratic fiscal policies, including tax policy.

So...........where are any of those jobs that the tax cuts to the wealthy, aka 'job creators' were supposed to generate?

Under the right wing dominance of the House, and the gain of a larger obstructive minority in the Senate, there has been very little effort in the first nine months of 2011 to address jobs.  The first six months of 2011, there were no efforts to pass ANY legislation other than right wing culture war bills.

So, when are the citizens of this country going to start asking why it is that the tax policy of the right hasn't done what it promised to do for the last 10 years? 

When will slogans stop replacing substance?  When will the tea party kool-aid drinkers stop being true believers and become a bit more skeptical?

The reality is that it is the wealthy, not the middle class small business owners, who are outsourcing jobs overseas, and it is corporations sitting on unprecedented cash supplies which are having mass firings.  This New York Times article  from 2010 goes into the developments more comprehensively.  Corporations are making money while cutting jobs, but that money is staying in the pockets of the wealthy, while the majority of employees in their labor force, at all levels below the top, are getting squeezed.

"“There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy,” Mr. Harris added. “Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”


The trend is hardly limited to Harley. Giants like General Electric and JPMorgan Chase, as well as smaller companies like Hasbro, the toymaker, all improved their bottom lines despite slowing sales in the second quarter. Among the S.& P. 500 companies that have reported second-quarter results, more than one in 10 had higher profits on lower sales, nearly twice the number in a typical quarter before the recession, according to Thomson Reuters.
“Whole industries are operating at new levels of profitability,” said David J. Kostin, chief United States equity strategist at Goldman Sachs. “In the downturn, companies managed to maintain higher profit margins than ever before.”


Profit margins — the percentage of revenue left over after expenses — crumble in most recessions, as overall sales fall but fixed costs like infrastructure, commodities and rent remain the same. In 2002, during the recession that followed the bursting of the technology bubble in addition to the Sept. 11 attacks, margins sank to 4.7 percent. Although the most recent downturn was far more severe, profit margins bottomed out at 5.9 percent in 2009 and quickly rebounded. By next year, analysts expect margins to hit 8.9 percent, a record high.


The difference this time is that companies wrung more savings out of their work forces, said Neal Soss, chief economist for Credit Suisse in New York. In fact, while wages and salaries have barely budged from recession lows, profits have staged a vigorous recovery, jumping 40 percent between late 2008 and the first quarter of 2010.


Harley-Davidson’s profit gain last quarter was helped by a turnaround in its financing unit, as well as more efficient production, but the company is still cutting.

And this more recent article, from the L.A. Times, details some of the most dramatic losses in jobs, following zero growth August 2011.

BofA to cut at least 40,000 jobs


The layoffs reflect Bank of America's deepening woes and are likely to take a heavy toll on its California operations.


Bank of America has 45,000 employees in California and is expected to roll… (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)September 10, 2011
By Walter Hamilton and E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles TimesBank of America Corp. is preparing to slash 40,000 or more jobs nationwide, a dramatic retrenchment that reflects the deepening woes of the country's largest bank and the magnitude of the U.S. economic slowdown.

 thing that is growing, along with the size of the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us.  That is not a healthy economy.  A healthy economy benefits all classes, not a decline for most with a gain for the very few.
 
So..........when is it that those wealthy job creators will have enough money, in the eyes of the right wing corrupt politicians, both Republican and Tea Partiers, to start creating jobs? When? Not until that money is transferred back into the pockets of the middle and lower classes from whom it was swindled by unfair tax cuts.  Because we have a demand crisis, not a too-little-money-for-the-wealthy crisis.

From StLToday.com:Stocks, house values cited in decline of wealth in U.S.

At the same time, corporations hold a record $2 trillion in cash.
The value of Americans' stock portfolios fell 0.5 percent in the second quarter. House values dropped 0.4 percent.


Corporations held a record $2 trillion in cash at the end of June, an increase of 4.5 percent from the January-March quarter.


Consumers are already struggling with high unemployment and meager pay raises.


When people feel poorer, they spend less. That slows growth. Businesses then respond by cutting back on hiring and expansion plans. It can become a cycle.


Net worth is expected to fall even further in the July-to-September quarter because stocks plunged in late July and early August.


A key reason was the government said the economy barely grew in the first half of the year. Investors also reacted to lawmakers' battle over raising the government's borrowing limit and Standard & Poor's downgrade of long-term U.S. debt.
 
Eighty percent of stocks belong to the richest 10 percent of Americans, who also account for a disproportionate amount of consumer spending. The richest 20 percent represent about 40 percent of consumer spending.


The likely drop in wealth comes at the same time that incomes are stagnating, particularly for middle-income households. Average household income, adjusted for inflation, fell 6.4 percent last year from 2007, the year before the recession, the Census Bureau said. 

Conservative economic polices don't work; they haven't worked in the first decade of this century, but instead led to the greatest economic disaster of the past 70 years. They are wrong, they are bad, they are unsuccessful and they are corrupt.

The next time you hear someone on the right use the phrase 'job creators', stop for a moment.  Ask yourself, who are these wealthy job creators, and why aren't they creating jobs.

Because they aren't job creators, they are job destroyers.  When you hear that phrase, someone on the right is lying to you, and they KNOW they are lying, and they don't care.  They just keep taking money, continue lying........and hope you won't notice.

Notice.  It's way past time to stop listening to the bullshit and to start looking at the facts behind it.