On December 4, President Obama rolled tape on the lame liberal line on inequality. After the glory years of liberal social legislation, minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, something went wrong in America, the president said.
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“[A]s good manufacturing jobs automated or headed offshore, workers lost their leverage, jobs paid less and offered fewer benefits,” Obama declared.
Get a clue Mr. President. The story of the last 200 years is that first farm jobs went down the toilet, then mining jobs, then railroad jobs, then manufacturing. Meanwhile per capita income went from $3 per day to $100 per day. You have a problem with that?
Here’s a hot tip. The next jobs to go down the toilet are government jobs. And the American people will end up much better off as those laid-off government workers get jobs that actually create wealth rather than destroy it.
“[B]usinesses lobbied Washington to weaken unions and the value of the minimum wage,” the president added.
They did? You could have fooled me. The impression I get is that all businesses except for Walmart are scared stiff about getting tagged as union busters. And big business can afford a high minimum wage while their small-business competitors cannot.
Here’s more: “As a trickle-down ideology became more prominent, taxes were slashed for the wealthiest”.
Not so.
First of all, “trickle-down” is a liberal pejorative, like a lot of modern hate speech. Secondly, taxes weren’t “slashed for the wealthiest” in the 1980s. Taxes were slashed for the lowest paid, removing them from paying any federal income tax. The share of income tax paid by the wealthiest actually went up; the 1 percent paid 40 percent of the federal income tax in 2007.
You could look it up at usgovernmentrevenue.com, Mr. President.
Notice how the rich take a hit with every recession, poor dears.
Here’s one the takes the cake: “investments in things that make us all richer, like schools and infrastructure, were allowed to wither.”
This is another boner. Let’s look at the numbers for all government, federal, state, and local Mr. President, at usgovernmentspending.com this time. The blue stuff is education and the red stuff is transportation.
Looks to me, Mr. President, that education and transportation got withered in the 1970s by Keynesian stagflation. And look what’s been happening since 2009 on your watch. Wither City, USA.
But never mind the cheap shots. Basically, government education and transportation are jogging along as a constant share of the economy. The question is, do these government “investments” do any good with all that money? I don’t hear you asking that question, Mr. President.
Here’s an idea we’d like you liberals and progressives to consider. Do you think that maybe cranking up government from 7 percent of GDP to 40 percent of GDP in the last century might have had something to do with the rise in inequality?
Because when government gets to spend 40 percent of GDP each year it doesn’t all go to the folks on the bottom. It goes to the cronies, the folks with the best lawyers, the best lobbyists, and the best liars.
According to Timothy P. Carney, cronyism is the worst kind of inequality. And the last five years have proved it.
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