I'm jealous of Republicans.
I'm jealous of their ability to speak with absolute certitude about those things which they are completely wrong. I also am jealous of their ability to elevate their volume, repeat the same moronic thing they just said, while many progressives just back off and let them have their point - often because we KNOW we aren't going to sway them with facts or nuance.
But mostly, since Republicans don't deal in shades of gray, I'm jealous of their ability to distill their talking points into 30-second, TV-friendly blurbs that they can repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
It really made me think today - how do you win an argument with someone whose emotional response has trumped any logical response they might have - or might ever have?
It made me think about the class war - a war which the middle class has been losing since around 1981 - yet it is a somewhat clandestine affair, one which the Republicans will never admit to prosecuting and one in which they will denounce us for any form of retaliation.
We've had a little bit of success framing the argument as "us vs. them" when we've talked about the plight of the middle class and the giant corporations. But I think that argument has peaked.
The problem is that we have framed these corporations in human terms. That's a mistake.
(DISCLAIMER: What follows is not a defense of large multi-national corporations. Keep reading.)
We have to understand that in this entire economic mess, the corporations have been the only rational actors. It's only natural - the motive of the corporation is to make profit. A corporation is not concerned with the human cost of outsourcing. A corporation is concerned with making the largest profit possible and delivering the highest benefit to its owners/shareholders.
A corporation can not concern itself with the plight of the middle class beyond the destruction of its purchasing power. If the corporation will make one penny more in profit by outsourcing every job to Mexico or China, that is the rational course of action. It is the course of action the shareholders will demand.
One needs look no further than today's economic environment to see the effects of pure, unregulated rational capitalism. And as we have been dragged into this "global economy", our working class has felt the most pain because the corporations by and large no longer need the purchasing power of the American middle class to make a profit.
Where in the world did we go so wrong?
Our citizens assumed corporations were irrational.
They assumed that by lowering taxes on high-income individuals that those folks would put that money back into their business, hiring more domestic workers and in turn "trickling down" the wealth to the middle class.
But that's completely irrational.
What happened is those same corporations increased their profits by moving production overseas, and now that those increased profits were subject to lower taxes, they were able to grow their bottom line and distribute the gains to their shareholders either through dividends or an increase in share value.
It's simply not rational to think that PEOPLE, out of the goodness of their heart, are going to share their money with those less fortunate than them when they can stash it away like Scrooge McDuck, at a significantly decreased tax rate than they would have had before.
If you work with the knowledge that corporations are in fact rational, and are trying to maximize profit, then the only way to encourage these same corporations to hire American workers when they could hire overseas for pennies on the dollar is through progressive taxation.
You increase the tax rates of these individuals - and these businesses, and allow them to take deductions as is done now for putting money back into their business. Deductions for hiring American workers at good salaries - after all, the money is better served in the hands of the American people than it is in the hands of the government, right?
You increase the tax rates on the top-waged people, and even include a couple higher tax rates (because honestly, $250k for a couple isn't as much money as it was just a few years back). Let's say we add another bracket at $1M at 45% and another one at $5M at 55%, and that we count dividends and capital gains as regular income.
As it stands, the tax rates are so low that even with deductions, it is still cheaper to outsource.
At this point, increasing the tax rates is the only way to rebuild the middle class. The leverage of American purchasing power is gone, and until we can figure out a way to empower Americans to become active participants in the economy, the recovery will continue to be anemic.
Today we're seeing the real effect of supply-side economics on this country. We delayed the inevitable through cheap and easy credit, but once that bubble burst the ugly underbelly of Reaganomics was exposed, revealing a Trojan Horse that threatens to transform what was once the most thriving nation in the world into a plutocracy.