In Increasing Taxes on the Rich is Not Socialism, Ahumbleopinion asks: “What is it about the Tea Party message that makes it easy to communicate?”
It’s simple, consistent, and mindless. They hate government and taxes. It ties into people’s fears, prejudices, and experiences….
You can’t refute the message directly, because no one will listen. [But] there is one thing that may be perceived as being as bad as government and taxes…” Big corporations.
I agree. We have to use stronger messages. Here are some additional ones that Democrats should be using.
When I see Democrats go up against it on the talk shows, they always seem to be bringing pea shooters to the battle. (Except Rachel Maddow. But, what makes us think she'll ever be invited on another Sunday talk show?)
We need to have our own simple-but-strong messages to hit back with. Here's a sample:
Taxes
Every times a Republican opens their mouth about taxes we need to respond with this (word for word, if possible):
Taxes are not too high. Incomes are too low. If you are having problems paying your taxes, you don't need a tax cut. You need a union.
For one thing, it assumes that the listener works for a living. In 99.999% of the cases, that will be true. Most people get more of their income from wages, salaries or other employee compensation than they do from equity. If your paycheck comes from your work, then it's stamped "DEMOCRAT". You should be voting accordingly.
Government
There's nothing very different between having services delivered by the government or by a large corporation. They are both large organizations that, generally, don't care about you. For all practical purposes a large corporation is a government. They have their own police force, fire protection, and government. Here's what to say about corporations:
There's no difference between a sufficiently large corporation and a government--except that with a legitimate government you get representation.
Who at Blue Shield is charged with taking your opinion into account, even in a theoretical way? Who is your representative? Who can you lean on to get justice?
With the federal government, you get four people to hold accountable: the President, two Senators and a Representative. You can access (in theory, again) the federal court system if you are outrageously aggrieved. Blue Shield? Nada.
Getting Rich
Are you scared that you will get super-rich and suddenly you'll owe so much in taxes that you'll have a hard time paying them? Get real. The rich have a built-in economic engine that keeps them rich. It's called "profits".
Basically, in any given for-profit transaction, there is a built-in percentage that goes to the rich. In any given case, it might not come to that, but in the aggregate, money is pumped to the rich through this percentage. It's like the percentage that the house gets at any casino.
Did you ever notice that if you take $100 to a casino it disappears practically before you even have a chance to get it out of your pocket? (I don't have this experience, but maybe you do. That's only because I don't gamble.) This is the magic of the percentage. It creates a kind of mind trick.
We think of, say, 5% as an annual amount. So, if someone says the house gets 5% then you might (naively) think that you'll walk away with 95% when you go home. It doesn't work that way because it's 5% on each transaction. That's why it only takes 14.65 seconds to lose it all.
The same is true of the rich. They get their percentage. As a group, the rich get their percentage on each transaction. That's what makes big corporations big. They are playing the percentages across a huge number of transactions.
You are fodder for this unless you and all your working buddies make sure that the income tax is progressive. It has to be progressive because that sops up all that excess money flowing to the top and redistributes it to the working part of the economy.
Notice what happened to the economy after the Bush tax cuts for the rich. It tanked. That's because the tax system that maintains the balance stopped working, allowing money to pool at the top (the way it would in any economy without a progressive income tax). Presto chango the vast majority of people (the working people, the ones in the working part of the economy) went dry and the economy went belly up.
I've got proposals out for a war tax (see my previous comments) because (1) the rich deserve it, (2) it would cut down on the number of wars we face in the future, and (3) we need them to pay off the war debt.
We need a progressive tax because otherwise only the rich will have money.
And, BTW,
There’s only one thing worse than something run by the government: something that’s run by a corporation.
Jobs
A lot has been said about jobs and the stimulus. Did it help? Did it create or save any jobs? Yes, it created jobs (and it will take them away). Here's why:
When the government borrows money and spends it, that creates jobs because there is more money being spent than would be otherwise. When the government pays off that debt, it takes away jobs because money is being paid to people holding T-bills and that doesn't go into anyone's paycheck.
So why do it? It's all a matter of timing. When the economy is contracting (because of a business downturn), the government borrows the money and spends it. This creates jobs and prevents the downturn from being as bad as it could be. Each dollar not only creates a job directly, but when the person receiving that dollar spends it, that helps to create jobs, too. This prevents structural damage to the economy and allows it to recover much faster. The problem is not just the number of jobs lost, but the number of jobs lost times the amount of time that person is out of work. If the downturn is shorter, then the economic damage is less.
During the upturn that follows, taking jobs away also helps. How? Because it keeps the economy from expanding as fast as it would otherwise and prevents it from creating a bubble. An overheated economy would lead to a quicker downturn. Cooling this keeps the expansion going longer.
There is a cost, of course. The debt has to be serviced. But the cost of servicing the debt is less than the massive help to the economy that comes from people being employed in productive work. The additional economic activity creates additional income, which results in higher income taxes (both personal and corporate) during the expansion. This pays for (in theory) the interest on the debt.
This hides the bigger problem, however. Our problem isn't just the economic downturn. It's the structural problem that comes from people being thrown out of work by jobs going abroad.
We need an international minimum wage. What this does is give all these big companies incentive to build manufacturing here in order to sell to our markets. This would bring more wealth-creating jobs back to the country. We need those jobs to pay off debt and to allow us to pay for healthcare and other services. It is simply wrong for companies to sell products here that are not made with our workplace and environmental standards.
A wealth-creating job is one that creates wealth. You create wealth when you take resources and form them into something that is more useful than the resources you used. For example, if you take iron ore and other materials and form them into steel, you have created wealth.
The problem we have is that the U.S. has too many wealth-distributing jobs compared to the number of wealth-creating ones. Wall Street jobs are wealth-distributing. They take wealth that already exists and move it around. This is useful to the economy in that it makes the economy smarter (in theory) and can allow us to make better use of resources. But it doesn't create any wealth with which to pay our bills.
The U.S. needs more wealth-creating jobs. To get them we need to insist that all products sold here are made according to our workplace standards and our environmental standards. It's only fair.
It’s time that our representatives, elected or not, start using “strong language”. While shaming the opposition (MinistryOfTruth) and screaming about the lack of progress (OPOL) are logical responses, we have to be effective at changing the course we are on. Getting our message out means going deep into liberal political philosophy and getting out the big guns. And using them.