Natural Born Job Killers: Republicans Obstruct over 4.2 million jobs
Most human beings appreciate a person who sets a long-term goal and achieves success through careful planning, dedication, and single-minded determination to see their final objective reach fruition. There are, of course, some goals that should never be made, much less achieved, and world history is replete with examples of dastardly leaders whose goals were not in the best interest of humankind and caused immeasurable damage to a great number of people. On Inauguration night in 2009, Republican leaders gathered to plot the absolute obstruction of President Obama’s economic agenda and thus far, they have been successful much to the disappointment of millions of Americans who continue to suffer the effects Republican’s goal of retarding economic recovery and job creation. The GOP makes matters worse by decrying the President’s handling of the economy when the truth is that if they had not blocked, obstructed, and stonewalled every one of the President’s plans to improve the jobs and economic picture, the economy would be much closer to achieving a robust recovery.
The only failure in Republican attempts to totally destroy the economy was their inability to obstruct the President’s stimulus the Congressional Budget Office and several independent agencies claim created over 3 million jobs. However, they have made up for that success by refusing to consider President Obama’s American Jobs Act proposed over a year-and-a-half ago, and coupled with severe austerity measures at the state and local level, they have been successful maintaining unemployment at over 8% instead of less-than 6% if they were not intent on obstruction and economic devastation.
There is no doubt the Republicans know what works to improve hiring and economic growth because every Republican administration has invested in hiring more public employees during a recession, and they always depended on federal funding to increase the workforce at the federal and state level, and not giving more tax breaks to their imaginary “job creators” they claim leads to full employment. The GOP austerity measures were not limited to blocking federal money to help states hire and retain employees, because states with Republican governors and legislatures made drastic cuts in the public sector workforce and many turned down federal aid to demonstrate their contempt for their residents, and the federal government. In California, for example, a Republican in Congress, Jeff Denham, is attempting to block implementation of a much needed high-speed rail project that will create over a million jobs as the largest earth-moving project in the state’s history, and sustain hundreds-of-thousands more jobs for maintenance and operation in cities up and down the state. His argument is that the government cannot afford the cost and the money is better spent creating jobs…with more tax cuts for “job creators.”
The austerity measures Republicans are implementing have never worked during a recession and despite the abject failure of every European country that enacted austerity, they are hell-bent on following the countries that have no growth and soaring unemployment. Even the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Willard Romney, admitted that austerity during a recession is disastrous, and yet Republicans have killed over 600,000 public sector jobs that prevented 2.3 milliondownstream jobs from being created. Coupled with Republican obstruction of the President’s job plan in January 2011, they have effectively prevented 4.2 million Americans from finding good, living wage jobs, or enough to bring the unemployment rate down to 5.5% in a little over a year. Instead of cutting 600,000 teaching, police, firefighter and other public jobs, if states had increased those lost jobs by one-half, the unemployment rate would be under 5% and tax revenue would be up, the deficit would be reduced, and the economy would be humming along.
Republicans are now claiming that letting the Bush era tax cuts for the rich expire will kill more jobs, but the facts, and history, do not bear out their fallacious assertions. During the Clinton Administration, the wealthy paid 3% more in taxes and the economy added 22-million jobs, wages increased, and businesses boomed. In fact, during the Eisenhower Administration, the wealthy paid nearly 90% in taxes during the time when hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned from World War II, and the infusion of cash created the nation’s highway system, a booming economy, and the great middle class. The GOP knows how to create jobs, but they have no interest in America’s economy, or its people and they must relish the thought of killing jobs and retarding economic growth as they planned in 2009, and will continue throughout 2012.
There is a tax plan in the Senate proposed by Democrats that gives small businesses a 10% tax cut in exchange for hiring new workers and raising employee’s pay. It also allows businesses to fully deduct the cost of significant investments made in 2012 as an improvement to the current law that caps write-offs at 50%. An independent firm specializing in economic modeling estimates the legislation will add 1 million new jobs to the U.S. economy. The plan should give Republicans wet-knickers for including a tax cut for real small-business job creators in the healthcare, social services, and retail industry, and it passed a test vote in the Senate yesterday. However, because it was a Democratic plan, Republicans insist on loading it with amendments and the Republican-controlled House will surely oppose it because it creates jobs, and not tax cuts for the rich.
It is a travesty that Republicans hate Americans with such a passion that they deliberately obstructed over 4.2 million jobs, and continue advocating for more tax cuts for the wealthy as they seek out ways to kill more jobs. They have also resisted attempts by the President and Democrats to rescind tax breaks for corporations that ship Americans’ jobs overseas, and there is no telling how low the unemployment rate would be if they did their jobs. However, they have fulfilled their goal of obstructing economic recovery and job creation measures so one can imagine they celebrate every new report that unemployment is stuck at a little over 8% when the reality is if they cared about the economy or the American people it would be under 5%, and that is without letting Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire. But that is the Republican Party that cannot compromise, help the American people, or help fix the economy their policies sent to the edge of the abyss. But they still have time to finish the job they started and obstruct America into a deep economic recession which appears to be their true plan that began in 2001 and should reach fruition by December 2012 when the Mayans predicted the world comes to an end. Unfortunately for millions of unemployed Americans, their world ended when Republicans deliberately killed their jobs and obstructed every single attempt to restore them and it appears they still have not achieved their ultimate goal of destroying the economy to make room for more tax cuts for their precious, imaginary “job creators.”
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