DownWithTyranny!: Job Creation-- Or Another Opportunity To Give Our Tax Dollars To Wall Street Fascists Again?

Yesterday Politico published a scorching OpEd by neo-liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs isn't a one-dimensional drooling right-wing ideologue and, although his overall theme is anti-Keynsian claptrap, there is plenty in what he says that can't be denied.

Almost the entire country seems to agree that the debt deal is miserable. Yet the shouting does little to clear up what is really wrong with the deal and with the U.S. economy. Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats. But both parties are partners in America’s decline.

We need a new direction in the country, and that requires taking on the powerful interests represented by both political parties.

President Barack Obama has failed to lead the country out of crisis. This is not just because of right-wing opposition, but also because Obama has promoted the wrong ideas. He came to office following the end of a Wall-Street-fueled consumption binge that had started during the Clinton administration and collapsed in 2008.

...Obama surrounded himself with the Wall Street types who had deregulated the financial sector and thereby created the bubble economy under President Bill Clinton – Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Gene Sperling and many others.

What kind of economic policy can one expect when nearly every senior administration official on the economic team is tied to Wall Street? The answer is predictable: One that is unfair, shortsighted and loaded with gimmicks. Yet in our exhausted, post-binge economy, the gimmicks don’t even create a blip in jobs and growth, much less a sustained recovery.

...The Republican opposition is, of course, far nastier and its economics are even worse. The GOP holds that there is one and only one answer to every problem: lower taxes on the rich.

In the Republican ideology, the super-rich are the job-creators and therefore deserve all the money we can shove their way, even as tens of millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet. There is also the idea that the poor are unworthy-- for example, an illegal minority migrant household.

The Republicans forever prey on a divide-and-conquer mentality, which is indeed leaving our country divided and conquered by hate and fear.

Sachs may be feted as a great thinker of the 21st Century but Matt Taibbi is a far keener analyst of real life politics and how it interacts with real life economics. There's probably a lot they agree on but Taibbi's work is more informative, more practical and better suited to a non-academic real world. His latest column in Rolling Stone takes on the dreaded corporate tax holiday concept still being pushed-- vigorously-- by neo-liberal freaks on Wall Street and K Street and in the offices of Republicans and Blue Dogs. In fact corporate whores Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT) are co-sponsoring a bill, the Freedom to Invest Act, which would “temporarily” lower the effective corporate tax rate to 5.25 percent for all profits being repatriated to America from overseas profits.

Essentially, this is a one-time tax holiday rewarding companies for systematically offshoring their profits since 2004-- the last time they did this “one-time” deal.

The Brady bill is still alive and in speaking to three different Hill staffers (on the House side) over the last few days, I’m hearing that it was “unaffected” by the debt deal and that it continues to gain momentum, thanks in large part to a lobbying effort that two different staffers described as intense and ongoing.

For people interested in this story, I definitely recommend reading this Bloomberg article focusing on Cisco, one of the biggest lobbyers in favor of the tax holiday. This is a company whose CEO, John Chambers, wrote an editorial last October in the Wall Street Journal predicting that the tax holiday would generate a trillion dollars in repatriated earnings, money that Chambers insisted would outdo even Barack Obama’s stimulus as a job-creation engine:

"The amount of corporate cash that would come flooding into the country could be larger than the entire federal stimulus package, and it could be used for creating jobs, investing in research, building plants, purchasing equipment, and other uses."

And yet: Chambers’s company, Cisco, would not commit to creating so much as a single job if the tax holiday is passed. As it is, the company has already committed to a wave of layoffs. When asked a question about Cisco's plans w/regard to a potential tax holiday, the company’s spokesman, John Earhardt, declined to answer. From the Bloomberg piece:

"It’s unclear whether any jobs would come from Cisco, which announced plans in May to shed an unspecified number of workers. Earnhardt, the spokesman, declined to comment on hiring plans for the company, whose customers include Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and AT&T Inc. (T)