Tag: unemployment

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The Tea Party-GOP doesn’t care about YOU

The Tea Party/GOP thinks you are stupid and want to keep you that way. How else could the Big Corporate world, who back the Tea Party/GOP, convince you to vote against your own best interests? How else could you complain about government run health care before going to a doctor appointment paid for by Medicare? Why else would the TP/GOP candidates complain about deficits yet want to give bail outs and welfare to the Big Corps. The Tea Party/GOP doesn’t care about you.

They hope you don’t remember we had tax cuts from President Bush in 2001 and they didn’t help the economy. Ask yourself – where are those jobs that Bush promised? Over 8 years he only helped create a net of 3 million jobs. President Clinton helped create around 26 million in his 8 years.

They hope you don’t remember that they blocked any attempt to hold the bankers that crashed our economy accountable for their crimes. If the banks hadn’t been allowed to do what they did by the relaxing and non-enforcement of banking policy (changed in the mid-1990s by the GOP), and if the banks hadn’t relaxed their own standards to keep up the housing bubble, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

They want you to forget they got us into an unnecessary war in Iraq based on lies. There were no WMDs and Saddam Hussein had NOTHING to do with 9/11.

That is why the GOP lost in a big way in 2008.

Voting for the TP/GOP or staying home means one wants to continue the failed Republican policies of 2001-2008, messing with programs that help real people like the Health Reform Act and Social Security, and electing someone who wants to deny reproductive rights for women, for a start. Not to mention the other rights and liberties they want to roll back.

Since President Obama took office the TP/GOP voted against the unemployed, health care reform, small businesses, against a bill that would prevent medical expenses to be included in credit scoring, against veterans, and voted against the 9/11 first responders. And they are doing it funded by anonymous and in some cases foreign big business interests.

The TP/GOP doesn’t care about YOU.

Two years is not long enough to fire the Democrats. Bush and the TP/GOP messed up the country over 8 years. We almost slipped into a depression. Although not the best results, the Democrats passed a health care reform package, fiance reform, equal pay rights for women, helping bring the promise of the Internet to the country side, rescuing the auto industry from collapse, and much more even while the cheap labor conservatives in the TP/GOP said “No!”. And they said “No!” about everything coming from the Democrats.

The TP/GOP doesn’t care about YOU. They only care to make the rich richer and middle class extinct. They want to GO BACK to what the world was like before January 20th 2009. They want you to forget what it was REALLY like back then. They want to create a fascist state where the merchant class owns and rules the nation while us regular people SERVE them. The top six laws the TP/GOP think need to go away help a majority of people in this country. Voting for them means you don’t want social security, Medicare, Minimum Wage, and Unemployment Benefits to start.

If that’s what you want, if you want to prove you are stupid, then vote for the Tea Party/GOP or stay home, but don’t complain when you are not better off then you in 2012 then you are today.

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Tax cuts for the rich don’t create jobs – period

Thought this article on truthout actually tells the truth about the myth that tax cuts for the rich create jobs. It says it right off the top: “Let’s cut the baloney about jobs and rich people’s taxes. If corporate profits automatically turned into jobs for the little folk, the unemployment rate would be plummeting.”

That is what I ask all my friends in love with keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. If the tax cuts are so necessary to create jobs then where are all the jobs that were created during the time the tax cut has been on the books?

Companies don’t create jobs because they have extra money jingling in their pockets. They take on new workers when they want to expand, and right now the demand’s not there to warrant that growth. Corporations are in the business of maximizing profits for the benefit of their managers and shareholders. They’re not in the business of creating jobs, nor should we expect them to be.

And so how should we respond to Republican claims that restoring Clinton-era income tax rates for the wealthiest 2 percent would destroy jobs? We shouldn’t. They are irrelevant.

An employment policy based on further enriching the richest Americans — who may or may not spend their wealth on job-creating ventures — is like trying to feed chickens in the barnyard by dropping feed from an airplane. It’s far more logical to focus tax cuts on activities that are likely to expand American business.

The Rich Are Not Going to Give Us Jobs

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Republican Hoover shows us how NOT to handle the economy

The political debate concerning the economy includes the usual idea from the privilege elite that wealthy people need Bush’s tax cuts to be extended, that the unemployed will stay unemployed unless the dole is cut, and that the market will save us all. Those ideas are a load of crap simply based on history and as philosopher George Santayana once wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A simple look at how Herbert Hoover dealt with the start of the Great Depression shows us the truth:

Never say that Ryan or Hoover didn’t want to end the economic crises they lived through. But they both believed that government should have balanced budgets with low taxes above all else, and that the people needed “tough love” or they would decline into indolence. They thought that businesses always knew best and they would voluntarily “do the right thing” (although I would argue that Ryan actually believes they cannot possibly do the wrong thing.) Hoover scrambled after it was too late to put some more rational policies in place, but not in time to halt the Great Depression of his own political ignominy.

The difference is that Hoover didn’t know any better and didn’t have the lesson of the Great Depression to fall back on and Ryan does. He apparently missed class that day (or made it up by reading Amity Schlaes puerile garbage for extra credit.) And anyone who knows better can do nothing but scream at the TV — “he’s actually trying to put us into another Great Depression” — when they hear him say these things, as I just did.

Randy Fanboy Thinks he Invented Hooverism

In conclusion – been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Thanks Herbert Hoover!

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Kasich is wrong for Ohio Governor because he offers same rejected GOP plan

The 2010 election for the Governor of Ohio is a perfect example, on a smaller scale, of the Republican obstructionism and having no real ideas for governing. The GOP is also supporting a guy with a Mel Gibson short fuse.

John Kasich, the GOP candidate for Governor, served in the US House of Representives from 1983 to 2001 then left to cash in on his political connections as a contributor to FOX “news” and working for Lehman Brothers – the investment house that collapsed which led to our economy bombing in 2008. While in the House he was chair of the budget committee and helped craft a Federal budget that had a surplus for the first time since 1969.

Great news right? Well, not so much..

The surplus was based on financial deregulation, NAFTA, welfare reform, and first the dotcom bubble and then the housing bubble. Basically his “success” was based on the main GOP campaign tool box = pro-business policy, low taxes, and entitlement spending cuts.

Fast forward to 2008 and those “good” things led directly to the financial collapse. The bankers played their game and took their obscene paychecks, the housing bubble burst leading to millions of foreclosures, and the collapse of the economy took millions of jobs with it.

Kasich wants to do the same thing to Ohio. Yay!

Mr. Kasich, who held a “business roundtable” session in Lake Township on Tuesday, said the low ebb of the economy was made clear to him when he stepped out on the eighth floor of a downtown Toledo office building and saw nothing but vacant space.

“It was all empty, you know. The most important thing we can do here in this state is we’ve got to create a business-friendly environment so we can get some jobs,” he said.

Kasich says empty space is proof of tough times for city

A business-friendly environment is code for no regulations and no taxes – anything less than that doesn’t seem to work for him.

“I understand you have a very fine mayor here in Toledo, good guy, independent and all that, but he’s been saying he doesn’t like my program because I want to cut taxes. Well, how are we going to get anybody to come in here if we’re one of the highest-taxed states in the country?” Mr. Kasich asked.

Ohio has given away tax breaks like candy for decades. In fact major businesses in Ohio pay less income tax than many Ohioans. I wrote in a post in 2004:

Meanwhile the business inventory tax is being phased out, utility poll taxes were eliminated sometime ago, 81% of Ohio companies pay no more than $2000 a year in income tax, you are more likely to see tax breaks given to businesses for negligible requirements on their part, and Workers compensation taxes have been quite low for several years.

When it comes to community needs, Wachtmann and Gilb don’t care

That really hasn’t changed since then. The state has not added any income taxes and in fact had a 21% tax cut that was being phased in before the 2008 collapse forced the state to delay the last part of the cut. In 2008 Ohio’s corporate tax rate was 5.1% and yet the state is flirting with $8 billion dollars in red ink, cuts in dozens of programs and education among others.

In the current two-year budget, Strickland – and the General Assembly – reduced state general-fund spending by nearly $2 billion. In the previous budget, spending was cut by $1.5 billion.

CAMPAIGN AD WATCH: ‘Pulled’ – GOP anti-Strickland ad

As Strickland summed up Kasich as a candidate:

Bringing up Mr. Kasich’s claim that some 400,000 jobs were lost during his term, Mr. Strickland said, “what John Kasich and his cronies on Wall Street did was more responsible for job loss in Ohio than anything I’ve done.”

He said Mr. Kasich had voted as a congressman against a $1 billion veterans’ benefit targeted for treating head injuries and repeatedly voted for a bill to allow wealthy people to avoid taxes by renouncing their citizenship.

Strickland challenges Kasich to debate tax elimination plan

Strickland has it right. The so-called 400,000 job loss (really only 379,000 through June) was not Strickland’s fault. He also isn’t responsible for the Republican controlled Ohio Senate that offered no plan to balance the budget and tried to hold onto the final bit of that irresponsible 21% tax cut. He also isn’t responsible for banks holding their bail out money and not lending it out. Strickland isn’t responsible for the lack of sales keeping any recovery muted and he sure can’t force businesses to do anything in Ohio until the recession subsides.

Kasich doesn’t have any real solution to Ohio’s economic problems. They are much bigger than the Governor and simply “cutting taxes” isn’t going to work. If Kasich wins then Ohio will continue down the road of bad roads, worse education, and increased suffering of people not associated with the big banks like Kasich.

Kasich’s “business-friendly environment” plan is the same old same old screw regular people plan that a majority of Americans rejected in 2008 when they gave control of the national government to the Democrats. Why in the heck would we want that failed plan in Ohio.

Kasich is just wrong for Ohio. Not to mention he seems to have a short Mel Gibson type temper.

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