Nick Hanauer: “Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators“
I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.
Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.
When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.
It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.
That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
Mike Kimel: “A Thought Experiment: What Would a Perfect Libertarian State Look Like a Hundred Years Later?“
The road to serfdom is very pretty when you first get on it, so much so that those who are most vocal in warning us about the perils of where it leads don’t realize that’s the destination they’re promoting.
Dean Baker: “Time to Retake Politics From the One Percent in Both Political Parties“
As it stands, the One Percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.
The deficit is the agenda of the One Percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the One Percent.
This is not a statement of morality; it is a statement based on economic reality. Budget deficits can be a problem when an economy is near full employment and the deficit can be pulling resources away from private investment, thereby slowing growth. However, it is not a problem with large numbers of unemployed workers and vast amounts of excess capacity.
This is what the financial markets are telling us every day as interest rates on long-term government bonds hover near 2.0 percent. If deficits were really crimping the economy, we would be seeing interest rates of 6 or 7 percent, or even higher. The deficit hawks do not have an economic case to support their argument, just money and influence.
Glenn Greenwald: “Ruth Marcus reveals another journalistic value“
The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus reveals another … leading journalistic value — extreme deference to those in political power — with a column denouncing Emma Sullivan, the 18-year-old high school student in Kansas who committed the crime of saying something disrespectful about the Hon. Sam Brownback, her state’s Governor.
… Marcus finds Sullivan’s conduct to be terribly upsetting and wrong. First, the journalist questions whether Sullivan, as a student, even has a constitutional right to write what she did (“Sullivan has a First Amendment right to express her views — although not unlimited”); it’s always inspiring when journalists become the lead advocates for legal limits on political speech. But then Marcus gets to her real point: it is wrong to speak so ill of our nation’s honorable leaders:
Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. … If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smartalecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip. …
Behold the mind of the American journalist: Marcus — last seen in this space three years ago demanding that Bush officials be fully shielded from all accountability for their crimes (the ultimate expression of “respect for authority”) — wants everyone to learn and be guided by extreme deference to political officials and to humbly apologize when they offend those officials with harsh criticism. In other words, Marcus wants all young citizens to be trained to be employees of The Washington Post.
David Sessions: “Evangelicals and Nonpartisan Piety“
This proliferation of nonpartisan lingo in evangelical circles is pernicious. First, it allows conservatives to pretend their ideas are not as extreme as they are. Relevant can put “progressive culture” in its slogan, and “hipster Christians” can blather about art and consumerism. This makes them look very cool and culturally synced, but it obscures the fact that most of them have beliefs that are deeply offensive to liberal democracy, like that the right to marry should only be granted to certain kinds of adults. They really, really don’t want to talk about what they actually believe, because doing so would force them to actually suffer the cultural consequences of holding those beliefs. So I think if you’re a conservative evangelical, or even a sort-of-conservative post-evangelical, you can take up the nonpartisan mantra as a way of writing yourself into mainstream inoffensiveness, a way of deflecting some of the stigma of being what you are. And I think people who have extreme views should have to admit to their own extremism. This is why I respect the unequivocal theocons I debate, who are worthy opponents precisely because they don’t apologize for what they believe.
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