The Job Creator Argument

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Frankly the state of the world is a bit much for me to handle without having a neurological meltdown.

But I have to address the “Job Creator” mythology.

It is absolutely true that when people have money they create jobs. They hire accountants, gardeners, child care providers, employees to help with their companies. In the late 1980s after the Reagan years (the man who perpetuated the myth of the ubber rich as “job creators”) one percent of the population controlled 90% of the world’s wealth.

After the 1990s, more specifically by 2001 (before George Jr could completely unleash his plan to  finish off the American Dream)  10% of the population in the US controlled 71% of the wealth here. Now that’s still not that awesome, but as we all know during the 1990s there were more millionaires in the US than ever before and chains that started during this period (like Starbucks) were forced to give employees a living wage and excellent benefits to entice people to work for them. The economy was healthy and the US debt was set to not only be paid off but there was to be a surplus which would have gone a long way to save Social Security and other much-needed social programs – that is before George Jr. decided to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (both civilians and soldiers but we’d prefer not to think about all the innocents who died so they aren’t even counted in our stats) and thousands of American soldiers, for what amounts to some personal vendetta against Saddam Hussain under the cover of fear that 9/11 provided. And of course his half-hearted attempt to find Osama Bin Laden which he later said after thousands died, he didn’t spend much time thinking about.

We are in this financial mess because of these horrendous wars as well as deregulation of multinational corporations. We can put some blame on Clinton for deciding the US was going to become the brains of the world and the rest of the world would be our manufacturing plant. This certainly cut off options for a great many Americans and dramatically changed corporate culture – impacting it in a very negative way.

The myth of the “Job Creators” broken down in the most base terms: You have 10 millionaires – they employe 1,000 people. You have 100,000,000 millionaires – they employee 10,000,000,000 people. It is sort of akin to a body in motion stays in motion – meaning more money circulating, enables more products to be made giving people more jobs and the opposite is also true – less money circulating through the economy makes new products harder to buy, get off the ground and become successful and therefore fewer jobs are created. The best metaphor was something I heard on NPR from an economist. He said (I’m paraphrasing here): It’s like a poker game. If all the players keep winning in equal measure then the game can be played infinitely. But if one guy keeps winning hand after hand, eventually all the players go broke and the game collapses.

This is in essence what happened to our economy.

After a certain amount of wealth money just ends up out of the circulation in the economy – take for example a guy who has 10,000,000,000.  Most of that money will inevitably sit in a bank, or in bonds or in investments because he is not able to utilize all those resources. His money will just make more passive income for him, accumulating residuals on work he is not doing. And control of this much of the world’s resources creates an imbalance that is antithetical to the tenets of DEMOCRACY. There’s a reason Republicans aren’t called Democrats. They are not of the people for the people. At this point I’m not sure anyone in our government is. It seems money, privilege and lobbyists have poisoned our system from the inside out.

The argument that the “working poor” are “lazy” and that the wealthy are productive is ass backwards. I have met innummerable people who work 16-20 hours a day seven days a week doing multiple jobs just to make ends meet for their family. Unless you count the amount of time Donald Trump talks about how awesome he is to the media, then he couldn’t possibly be working as much as those he deems”lazy.”

Check out the outrageously sociopathic and offensive interview Trump did with Piers Morgan where he states the Chinese “just work harder” (oh, yeah and they have no child labor laws or protection for workers – think Dickinson’s England) and he pines away for the Chinese ability to “not have to get permits” for anything. He is a disgusting man and about as sick as it gets considering Climate Change, and the fact that more than half the US population lives in poverty despite the fact that many of these people have two people both working full time and often more than 40 hours a week. Trump also endorsed Michelle Bachman who I actually was working on a post about. I’m going to deconstruct her chart. I think someone must have put LSD in Trump’s hair spray. He’s beyond out of touch with reality.

Pray that the meek truly do inherit the earth because the wicked are fighting for control right now. May those without conscious live in the hell they are creating for the rest of us who care about our fellow beings and have empathy for others.

Many blessings to the good people of this world,

Denise