I had decided that I wasn’t going to pile on John Boner for a while; it’s too easy and I don’t want to be tiresome. But then I heard him get up after Obama’s press conference this morning, with his pink tie and weird sun tan and say that the American people “won’t stand for raising taxes on job creators” and he and his posse weren’t going to stand for it either. When I regained control of the car and managed to stifle the retching I decided that I need to step on his neck and make sure he stops twitching before I ease up on him and his boy wonder, Eric Cantor.
I suppose it gets to be repetitive but just to provide some context to this completely ridiculous statement it bears repeating, just once more. The “tax increase” on these powerful engines of employment amounts to the rescinding of tax subsidies to oil and gas companies intended to give them an incentive to continuing the development of technology and exploration and research into new oil and gas fields. But since they are swimming in cash, Obama figures they probably will manage to continue to operate without those tax breaks and, oh by the way, where are all the damn jobs they have been busy creating over the last ten years?
It’s been reported that corporations are sitting on 2 trillion dollars in cash, waiting to figure out someplace to spend it. Are they creating jobs? Obviously not. The economy isn’t sputtering along because corporations are hurting for money – the stock market has been slamming for well over a year. It isn’t that the government is too big, or that taxes are too high; it’s because the vast majority of the country doesn’t have the money to buy anything. The money has all been sucked to the top. CEO’s got a 23% raise last year and middle class wages were flat. The average CEO makes close to 300 times what they pay their workers. Their entire argument is bullshit, pure and simple.
Listening to Obama this morning it was easy to figure out what his problem is in trying to deal with Boner and his country club stiffs – he makes too much sense; he is too much of an adult. He sounds like a tired and slightly pissed off baby sitter telling the kids that they have to get their little asses in bed. He makes Boner and Cantor and trout-faced Mitch McConnell seem like empty suits. Or sound like those smirking kids who used to repeat everything you said until you finally back-hand them.
Ever since I can remember politicians in general, but republicans particularly, have used the same strategy when trying to convince the country to do something or adopt a certain position and that it to repeat the same lie over and over and over again. The lie gets reported and people not paying attention hear it being reported and figure it must be true. There is also what I call the Ed Meese corollary, which is, if you can’t prove it, I didn’t do it but that’s a conversation for another day. The current lie is that changing tax policy to increase revenue as a part of a package deal to reduce the deficit is a crippling tax increase and that if we just leave the rich people alone they’ll get busy starting new companies and creating new jobs right and left. It’s no wonder these guys sit across the table from each other for hours on end playing finger football and getting nowhere.
The big lie, though, is that this pissing match is so very important to our country and our economy. It is a convenient distraction and keeps voters from doing the basic arithmetic and figuring out that the 500 billion dollars that Afghanistan is going to cost in the next 10 years and the 500 billion it’s cost already and the 800 billion that Iraq has cost is pretty close to the 2 trillion they’re now talking about cutting to reduce the big, bad deficit. How sad is that? How discouraging to see that the Iraqis are still fighting the same fight as they have for a couple of hundred years and still blowing each other up after all that?
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