On Thursday, President Obama will give a speech about job creation in front of Congress. The emphasis should, hopefully, be on
job creation, as opposed to the lovely new talking point of
job creators, which is the most current Republican phrase for people who are richer than you, and therefore better than you. I am not sure if anyone has yet undertaken a study of "job creators," defined apparently as "any wealthy person," to see if they actually have been creating jobs, but it might be interesting to find out.
It seems that no matter how bad the economy gets, the prescription on the Republican side is going to remain the same: cut aid to the poor and the sick, cut taxes on the wealthy, and cut both taxes and pesky regulations on large businesses. Their obsession is with feeding the rich, and taking from the poor, and whether or not that has any larger effects—say, crippling the middle class, or making it more and more difficult for the vast majority of the American public to buy any of the products the "job creators" want to sell them—is entirely ignored. It is perhaps short-sighted, but that is how American business has been taught to run itself, over the last decades; an emphasis on near-term gains, no matter what the eventual costs. We're just treating the government like a business, I suppose.
What is less clear is what the Democratic plan for fixing the economy might be. There are many different ideas, and heaven knows center and left-of-center economists (translation: anyone who still remembers their basic Keynes, back before the bastard was branded as evil incarnate, the devil child of Robin Hood and Karl Marx) continue to point out that there are very basic steps that can be taken, in an economy suffering from a lack of jobs and, therefore, a lack of consumer demand. If the Democratic party has coalesced around a single economic platform based on that, however, they have done a dismal job of conveying it.
Instead, we've been firmly hooked onto the austerity bandwagon, and at the expense of everything else. We're dropping ozone rules because of the "business uncertainty" they might create. We've agreed to an assortment of tax cuts that have nothing much to do with creating jobs, and are contemplating others. The stimulus did a decent job at stopping the bleeding, but the patient is still nowhere near recovery, and not much since then has been focused on actually fixing anything.
A Republican plan for "repairing the economy" would consist of cutting taxes, weakening regulations, more free trade agreements, and (for some reason) cutting the deficit right the heck now. What Obama's speech on Thursday will bring is known only to Obama and his advisors, but hopefully it will draw a clear distinction between those things, which are ancillary to the economy at best, and a true jobs and recovery program. Will we get a new New Deal? Not likely. But investing in the future, via infrastructure improvements in transportation, clean energy and the like would set America back on the path to sustained competitiveness, and given the current bond and job markets, would be both cheap to finance and very, very effective.
It used to be that both our businesses and our government knew the long-term value of investing in infrastructure, in training, and in science—all those irritating things that have no immediate payoff, but set the company or nation in prime position for growth over the long term. Our greatest economic challenge may simply be in remembering those lessons.
Top Comments for today are here.