Nom nom nom...

I am eating this up like Christmas candy.



To be fair, this is only a handful of the people at that rally. In fact, it was probably the same handful of people that were at the other rallies. A traveling caravan of troglodytes. Travelodytes, if you will.

Haha, no. Go, wingnuts, go! Drive right off that cliff and take your party with you.

I was kind of annoyed earlier this week when I read something on the comedy website 23/6. Jim David, in a column about the outrageous comments heard at recent McCain-Palin rallies, distilled a grand, eloquent argument I spent all goddamn weekend making into this:

I've heard plenty of liberals make nasty comments about Bush, but most of those were justified given his disastrous record and the fact that he's such a total doofus. The attacks on Obama are personal, racist, and fear based.

To think that I've spent all week with a sinus headache that I'm beginning to think was God's punishment for calling George Bush a war criminal when I could have just said Bush is a doofus with a disastrous record. Son of a bitch.

But today I'm not looking to debate exactly how much of the Republican party is comprised of Confederate Yokels, Backwoods Mouthbreathers and other assorted Travelodytes. (Forty percent? Sixty percent? All of them except Ron?) At the end of our last debate, Buck asked a question about the economic principles of Republicans and conservatives. By that point my sinus headache was in full swing so I figured I'd let Ron respond and maybe jump in with some counterpoint when I felt better. I feel better now, but the original post is down a bit so I'll do that here.

Buck asked why it is such a sin to pay taxes in America. Ron gave a decent view of Republican economic theory, but glossed over an important point when he said "it isn't that Republicans don't want to pay for things so much as Republicans want tax programs that keep the economy growing and aren't restrictive on private enterprise."

I have no doubt that if you gave the fiscal conservative wing of the Republican Party the opportunity to end Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Federal Welfare without political repercussions, those programs would be gone before you ended the sentence. A result of their inability to significantly cut these programs without severe political consequences, such as probably never winning another election in any area with a sizable population of the not-wealthy and/or elderly i.e. everywhere, is the desire to reduce taxes on the wealthy and either correspondingly increase taxes on the middle classes or run a ridiculously huge deficit.

Ron makes the case for lower taxes on the wealthy leading to job growth with an anecdotal story about adding a position at Marcus G. Finkelstein's Office Emporium and Sundries due to increased purchasing in the wake of Bush's first tax cuts. But was that higher rate of spending was sustained in any meaningful way? After eight years of lower taxes on the wealthiest percentile we have had anemic job growth which has turned the corner into minor employment contraction. (We're also in a recession which may last into 2010, but I hear that has something to do with the lack of rules on how rich people invest their money. Apparently a bunch of people fell for a Nigerian email scam.)

Contrast this with the Clinton administration, where there were higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations than during the last eight years along with, as we all know, unprecedented economic ass-kicking and name-taking. Taking all this into account leads to two conclusions that are neither mutually exclusive nor directly corrrelated: A) marginal tax rates on the wealthy and corporations do not directly influence economic and job growth and B) there are more factors involved in economic and job growth than marginal tax rates on the wealthy and corporations.

In Ron's story, a job was created because businesses were buying furniture, which is pretty straightforward: a job is created when people are buying goods and/or services. But let's extrapolate that story out a bit. Franklin M. Spankington's Monocle and Top Hat Warehouse gets a tax break and uses that extra money to buy a new forklift. Billy Bob's Forklifts 'n' Shit uses the extra revenue to hire a new worker, Tommy B. Fuckedbythewealthy-Justyouwaitandsee. That new worker, due to eight years of wage stagnation and a tax burden shifted to the lower classes, finds that after paying bills and buying food and clothes, he doesn't have the disposable income to buy that new monocle he wanted. Spankington's revenue falls because the middle class no longer has the money to buy his goods and so he has to fire Mike R. Upshitcreekseriouslyfuckthepoor, plus he can't buy new equipment so Billy Bob's revenue falls and Tommy gets fired, too. The point here is that it is arguable that if the lower classes don't have money to spend on disposable goods and services, revenues fall in the private sector and jobs are lost. Actually, it seems pretty clear that this is exactly what happens.

But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that the CEOs of Spankington's and Billy Bob's are making approximately 362 times what their base employees are, which is like 20 times what CEOs were making 15 years ago and is well out of whack with inflation*. Some might consider this, along with wage stagnation and regressive tax rates, a sign of severe wealth inequality suggesting that since the CEOs weren't interested in taking pay cuts or reducing the dividends of shareholders in order to save Tommy and Mike's jobs, it doesn't really matter what the tax rates are for the wealthy and corporations because they're gonna do whatever the fuck they want regardless of what anyone thinks about it. And if it looks like economically liberal politicians might get another foothold in government and try to fix this fucked up situation, the party representing the wealthy and corporations will pander to otherwise abhorrent social conservatives and the terminally ignorant to win elections by a slim margin and then claim a "mandate" to do things that are detrimental to the vast majority of the country. At first we wonder if someone is confused about what "mandate" means until we remember that the wealthy and corporations are gonna do whatever the fuck they want regardless of what anyone thinks about it.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that by pointing this out I have exposed myself as a Communist and have all the credibility of a severe schizophrenic on a three-week meth bender. Don't bother evaluating your own financial situation and the financial situations of others like you and compare them to the financial situations of the fabulously wealthy. The fabulously wealthy have worked hard and earned every penny they have while you are a lazy roustabout. And while I'm on the subject, it should be noted that even though using Paris Hilton as an example of why we need a stronger estate tax is like using severe thirst to argue for a glass of water, the fact that I have even considered such a thing makes me very, very anti-American.

So what's the solution? Probably armed revolution, to be honest. Unfortunately the only people with enough guns to facilitate armed revolution think Obama is a secret Arab Muslim terrorist. Son of a bitch.

*I just pulled these numbers out of my ass because I don't feel like searching for the real figures, but if I recall correctly these numbers aren't far off. Either way, the real figures are less funny and just as disgusting.