Cut taxes and gut regulations, and maybe
we'd be willing to give you some jobs.
Herman Cain has come up with a way to, in his mind, help all the Americans who would be squashed like bugs under his new and ridiculously premised tax plan. First off, he'll concede that people at or below the poverty line shouldn't have to pay his income tax. They will still, apparently, have to pay his new federal sales tax. But that's apples and oranges (as in, if you want to eat apples and oranges, you have to pay a national sales tax on them.)
But the heart of Cain's new announced plan is something he calls Opportunity Zones. Throughout America, he envisions building little Republican Thunderdomes. They will be places in which businesses will pay reduced taxes, in exchange for the local government agreeing to abandon an assortment of worker protections, regulations and the like. Businesses will then flock to these little Somalias of Opportunity, jumping at the opportunity to hire workers with no minimum wage and substantially reduced safety and health regulations, and this will be a great thing.
Among the highlights of a Cain Opportunity Zone:
- Elimination of minimum wage laws.
- Reduction or elimination of payroll taxes.
- Reduction of building codes and other safety regulations.
- Reduction or elimination of zoning laws
The last two are especially interesting: Cain is presuming building codes and zoning laws are holding businesses back, and wants to remove the ones that may "impede economic growth." If you want to build your coal-fired power plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood, shouldn't you be allowed to? And do we really need building codes to ensure buildings are safe to work in? (Hell, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was doing just fine until those meddlesome regulators stepped in.)
Awarding much-valued Thunderdome status to a community will be, in the words of Cain's plan, based on "how far state and local authorities are willing to go to increase incentives and reduce barriers and how much local support is in place." In other words, the more regulations and corporate taxes you're willing to cut, the more likely it is your town will be put in the "Opportunity Zone" program, cutting more corporate taxes. Right now we're competing with other countries who are willing to treat their workers like disposable crap: the Cain plan is to let individual towns in America ride that same gravy train.
If this sounds like a Republican plan to benefit corporations on every possible level, all on the premise that the lowly rabble should be Damn Fucking Glad to get whatever crumb of an unsafe, underpaid job might fall their way, you'd be right. The "Opportunity Zone" plan is aimed squarely at "lower skill, labor intensive" businesses and at desperately poor neighborhoods. If you poor people are willing to agree not to hold companies to the same wage and safety standards as they'd be subjected to in other parts of the country, and are willing to get rid of whatever other pesky regulations or building codes or taxes that everyone else might be subjected to, then perhaps we will send some jobs your way.