The Republicans are bad at governing but they're real good at messaging. Lately, our team is bad at both.
In the Republican fantasyland, a jobs bill is giving tax breaks to companies that are not employing people because there is no one able to buy the products they are making in Korea or China. If we keep making them richer, maybe they'll share some, after all, they're job creators.
Our theme, lately, is public works, which Krugman incessantly wrote about in the first weeks of the Obama administration (but Obama would not listen). So the stimulus, while helpful for a too brief period, was too little, with too much in tax cuts, and timed to expire right when he would be running for relection. We need better programs and better marketing.
And, we need a new definiton of a jobs bill. I have a suggestion or two.
Sit down for a minute for what I am about to suggest. Accept Grover Nordquist's contract for the moment as he does control the House and nothing will pass that does not live within his constraints and, drive a wedge between the panderers who signed his contract. But, we can do a lot within those constraints that he does not think we would ever suggest. That is, we should propose the elimination of scores of special interest deductions and give aways. Raise capital gains rates so that the difference between money working and people working is less dramatic. Eliminate the outrage of hedge fund managers paying capital gains rates on ordinary income. Eliminate the tax incentives for mergers on the basis that they make the combined companies more efficient, a euphemism for having fewer employees. And, from the additional tax revenues generated, lower tax rates for those who would spend the money boosting demand.
Adopt a "capital budget" in Washington that distinguishes between debt to fund operations from debt to acquire assets. And figure out how much of our existing debt is for capital acquisition. Has anyone seen the capital debt Rick Perry assembled in Texas while "balancing" his budget? And, once we see a capital budget, we can then more easily sell a large new capital program, financed with historic low interest and sold with the phrase, "Let's leave our grandchildren with assets."
Restore Glass Stegall, requring the divestiture of massive elements of the major banks, which would then need to reemploy the people who lost jobs in the mergers. And don't let them tell us free market principles put those companies together. It was tax policy spurred by bail outs.
Impose market concentration rules on bank deposits by region and by state, to keep the giant banks from sucking up deposits and not making loans. And impose divestiture requirements on the existing too big to operate banks to achieve deposit competition. More new jobs, filled by people who would be trained to talk to people.
And stop the idiocy of the FDIC which is preventing banks from making loans on assets that are now deflated. This agency, which missed the boat from 2001 to 2006, is now pouring water on a fire long extinguished but keeping the building from being rebuilt.