Do you wonder why it is so tough for one to find a job with a sustainable salary with benefits to boot nowadays? Benefits would include affordable health care insurance coverage as well as the means with which to contribute to a 401K retirement plan.
It seems that decent paying jobs that include health care and retirement benefits are becoming a blast from the past in today's United States of Corporate Greed.
Cross posted on Texas Kaos.
Whoops.
Please forgive the Freudian slip.
Not.
Fasten your seat belts, folks and get ready for a very tough and fast ride on a road called harsh and mean reality.
And please do be prepared to read, baby, read for I offer a broad and general overview of why I think Republican economic ideologies and policies have had all but destroyed the middle class.
Unfortunately for America and fortunately for the United States of Corporate Greed, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, the Texas Taliban and most Republican voters in the Texas and in the deep South have serious issues with reading and education.
Let's begin with the evil doings of a 20th century revered and beloved Republican Saint known as President Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989.
Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood B actor and later Governor of California won the Presidential election of 1981. As it turns out President Reagan's B performance in the movie industry turned into an A+ factor where Republican influential and deep pocketed power brokers were concerned. An unstoppable fund raising arm when coupled with an extraordinary PR message machine made it easy for Ronald Reagan to win elections and become a remarkably popular President.
This new found savior of all things American, thanks to his superior acting skills and carefully crafted speeches won the hearts, minds and souls of middle class workers most of whom were Democrats. Some of these folks later became Reagan Democrats.
Perhaps the pollsters who found that a majority believed that Reagan was the candidate most likely to "make America feel good about itself again" put their finger on the only truly positive emotion behind the large vote for Reagan. Reagan stands for a simpler bygone America redolent of small-town virtues, solid family ties, free from troublesome feminists and gay activists, the family Bible on the TV set, Jerry FaIwell on the screen. This year the Moral Majority replaced Nixon's silent majority of 1972. Neither really exist, of course, but a politician must sound themes that make people feel good about themselves.
Now, for a time, America can feel good about itself again. Reagan is the man from the land of the happy ending. Prosperity is, after all, just around the corner; the Russians will shrink to human size; the birds will sing and the children play without fear in our streets and on the grounds of American embassies all over the world; the avatar of the American dream has descended in the personhood of Ronald Reagan, whose sound remedy for unemployment is "get a job"--as he did when he became a sports announcer and the golden portals of Hollywood opened up to him. America will be the shining "city upon a hill," Reagan's crib from a sermon by John Winthrop in 1630 on board the ship Arbella bound for the New World.
The poor souls who wanted to believe that prosperity is always around the corner had no clue that Reagan's economic policies and those of subsequent Republican Presidents would fuel the ultimate demise of middle class Americans. In fact, President Reagan's message masters were absolutely brilliant at convincing middle and working Americans to buy into the ultimate downfall of their class.
And ever since the Ronald Reagan years the Republican Party has been on a single minded crusade to reward powerful corporate interests at the expense of middle and working class Americans.
For nearly thirty years Republican spin masters and snake oil charlatans have vehemently argued that when the rich become richer, lucky and plentiful crumbs will trickle down to 98% of the American people.
Given how the last ten years have played out with trickle down black magic economics in place we should all be living in cheap oceanfront mansions in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
As we well know by now few if any fabulous jobs or new found wealth has trickled down to middle class Americans. We also know that the wealthy have saved and not spent their generous tax cuts.
According to President Reagan's former Office of Management and Budget Director, David Stockman, recently said the following about his Republican Party.
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.
Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues the Bush Administration's mission to transfer the bulk of U.S. wealth to the rich at the expense of the health of the U.S. economy and middle class Americans.
Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.
Meanwhile back at the Mitch McConnell and John Boehner ranch for billionaires Republican spin masters have been bellyaching about evil doing federal spending and the deficit. "We have got to stop the spending!!!!" according to Mitch and John. "The American people want to stop spending!!!!" according to John.
Except that Mitch McConnell would not support tax cuts for the middle class unless the voters he serves, the billionaires, get tax cuts too.
According to David Stockman trickle down economics is a trojan horse to give tax cuts for the sole purpose of turning millionaires into billionaires.
It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.
Obviously suffering from a severe case of bi-polar dysfunctional disorder the Republicans now claim that tax cuts for the rich will not impact the deficit.
Except that they do.
The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.
Now that we know that the Republican Party has same the credibility as that of a pathological liar one can learn why the recovering economy today is mostly a jobless one.
For the policies and ideologies of the GOP over the last thirty years has taken us to yet a new level and devastating level of voodoo magic.
U.S. businesses hire more overseas than domestically
Thanks to Bush Co. and to the Republican Party of suck ups for corporate interests, American taxpayers are shouldering the burden of deep tax cuts and generous subsidies that have been extended to American corporations.
None of which are hiring Americans.
Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?
Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.
More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.
The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.
But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute's senior international economist.
The Bush Administration gave generous tax breaks and subsidies to American corporations in order to create a more friendly business environment in the U.S. But the corporations took the tax breaks and subsidies and set up shop overseas, especially in China and India where labor is dirt cheap. You and I pay more taxes than General Electric.
While most of DuPont's research labs are still stateside, Connelly says he's impressed with the company's overseas talent. The company opened a large research facility in Hyderabad, India, in 2008.
A key factor behind this runaway international growth is the rise of the middle class in these emerging countries. By 2015, for the first time, the number of consumers in Asia's middle class will equal those in Europe and North America combined.
"All of the growth over the next 10 years is happening in Asia," says Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and formerly the World Bank's chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.
The American corporations like the talent overseas because our schools at home, especially in Texas, fail its students in the critical areas of math and science.
Other economists, like Columbia University's Sachs, say multinational corporations have no choice, especially now that the quality of the global work force has improved. Sachs points out that the U.S. is falling in most global rankings for higher education while others are rising.
"We are not fulfilling the educational needs of our young people," says Sachs. "In a globalized world, there are serious consequences to that."
Tragically for Texas children we now have the equivalent of the anti-education Taliban crazies running the State Board of Education. These ideologues and religious zealots want to replace science with chapters and verses from the Christian bible. The Texas Taliban wants to rewrite American history to the point that slavery will sound like it was a really great and wonderful idea. These loony tune fanatics are, in fact, setting our kids up as low level players and future slavery in a global market place. If the Texas Taliban gets its way with science and history, few children here will be even remotely capable of competing in a global economy.
Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Laureate in economics, was not kidding when he wrote:
Banana Republic here we come.
There is no doubt that Texas will become a very bigger player in national politics. National progressives should start paying attention to the obvious, thank you.