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Sunday, April 03, 2011

Job Destruction Isn't Job Creation

Republicans are very good at robotically repeating their talking points until these phrases assume the force of common sense even when they are wrong, even when they are destructive, even when the majority of people repeating these destructively wrong phrases are themselves the chief targets for the destruction policies based on these falsehoods produce.

Democrats, on the other hand, are not at all good at explaining their own views, I fear, and this is so even after a generation of Democrats waving their hands and screaming that we need to be better at explaining our own views. This is troubling.

Sometimes it seems as though many Democrats themselves can't exactly say why the Republican's pet falsehoods are false, and that their own views differ from the Republicans on moral grounds rather than factual ones, say, worries about the pointless suffering that Republican views and policies cause or insisting on more equitable outcomes, however these are accomplished. Of course, there are also plenty of Democrats who can and do see that Republican views are not just ugly but dangerously false -- but many of these seem insular and incommunicative, too intellectually restless to repeat their messages enough to build up a congenial hegemonic commonsense for everyday people to weave their disparate experiences into, too self-indulgent to grasp that just because they have figured an issue out for themselves that doesn't mean that the issue is "over" and that everybody has "moved on" with them to a new issue, or a more complex re-casting of that issue, or what have you.

Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) delivered the Republicans' weekly address, and in the address he repeated Republican pieties I have been hearing repeated over and over and over throughout the nearly three decades of my voting life.
"Despite some recent signs of life, our economy still isn't creating enough jobs. And one of the reasons for that is the spending binge that's been going on here in Washington…. To support job creation in America, we need to keep the cuts coming, and we need to do much, much more. That's why it's important for Congress to get moving and pass a final bill that resolves last year's budget mess while making real spending cuts -- so we can tackle the bigger challenges facing job creation…. The president has also asked Congress to increase the national debt limit -- without any commitment to stopping the runaway spending that got us into this mess in the first place."

Many of the things Boehner said were dangerously wrongheaded, and none of them were new. Why after all this time can Republicans propound false notions about how destroying actual jobs is creating jobs -- or, for that matter, about how giveaways to the richest of the rich will trickle down to everybody else, about how industries and corporations that care first of all about profits can be counted upon to regulate themselves to be safe, honest, fair even when this is not profitable?

None of these claims is at all true. More to the point, none of them is even particularly plausible. These notions are counter-intuitive on their face, and hence vulnerable to easy refutation. All of these pieties have proven disastrously wrong in actual results experienced by majorities of people in their actual lives.

So, how on earth can Republicans still be repeating them so confidently for over thirty long years without facing by now instant, clear, concise, devastating rejoinders from all sides? Why do we still not have equally pithy slogans to fling against theirs, to put them on the defensive where they belong, to disrupt their pet narratives and metaphors. Aren't we supposed to have all the creative writers on our side? The problem has been clear for over a generation, and the effort to address it remains meager and sporadic at best.

And so, here we are, yet again, this time less than a week before a government shutdown deadline driven by even more extreme variations on these very falsehoods than Boehner's own, especially in the rabid forms cherished by the right-most "Tea Party" and Randroid zealots in the GOP who presumably made themselves a force to be reckoned with in their party and across the whole country in the mid-terms, here we are, yet again, hearing as ever the same erroneous, facile, frankly illiterate slogans and frames and formulations from the mainstream leadership of a party that holds the entire nation's policy apparatus hostage, putting us on the road to nowhere in a full-throated empty-headed mammalian roar of idiot enthusiasm via the threat of yet another ruinously expensive GOP government shutdown and even a threatened future default on our national debt, all to no purpose and in frank defiance of facts.

To avoid indulging the sin myself I accuse Democrats of committing so promiscuously, let me respond very briefly to Boehner's falsehoods myself, starting with the last one in the passage and moving backward to the first.

When Boehner accuses the President and Democrats of lacking "any commitment to stopping the runaway spending that got us into this mess in the first place" he is lying. Simple as that.

The "runaway spending" that got the United States into this mess involved the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans, which Obama tried to end and continues to advocate ending and hence is absolutely committed to stopping. As everybody knows, it was the Republicans who fought to keep this from happening by holding the entire agenda of the Democratic party hostage to their literally historically unprecedented obstructionism.

I want to add, by the way, that this unprecedented obstructionism was directed at Democrats who had just been elected to control of all three branches of government, the President with a higher proportion of the popular vote than any President in over a generation, a mandate incomparably more sweeping than the ambivalent "wave" of understandable but utterly inchoate mid-term discontent which Republicans now declare makes them the will of the American people incarnate, with a mandate so shattering that the rest of us need to shut the fuck up as they declare us corporate serfs, declare climate change nonexistent by fiat, and for all I know declare twice two makes five. Boehner makes this very hypocritical appeal himself, for example, when he says elsewhere in his little speech: "Americans rose up and demanded we stop the spending binge and start working together to create a better environment for job creation." One wonders why he showed so little respect for the far greater number of Americans who "rose up" for real to elect a man who advocated single payer, cap and trade, EFCA, and taxing the rich on the campaign trail for all to hear? Indeed, one wonders why his party shows their "respect" for Americans who presumably rose up to demand jobs here and now by presiding over an agenda that seems instead monomaniacally devoted to abortion bans and union busting rather than jobs? But I digress.

One imagines that by "runaway spending" in the quoted passage, Boehner probably means to refer primarily to healthcare reform, that great GOP bugaboo despite taking the actual form of GOP rather than better Democratic single-payer proposals. Of course, rather than representing "runaway spending" healthcare reform was a flawed but grownup and actually comparatively effective effort to constrain the single largest structural source of waste and economic instability in our economic system, the source of hyperbolically spiraling costs and bankruptcies almost all of which are avoidable in a more rational system reform brought us a step closer to, and all this very much in contrast with the reckless unpaid-for Republican sponsored Bush era provision of a Prescription Drug benefit, another key source of the "runaway spending" that got us into this mess and which Obama showed he is indeed "commit[ed] to stopping" by proposing policies that are actually paid for.

In addition, that "runaway spending" involved Bush's two ruinously expensive, strategically catastrophic, immoral and illegal war adventures, from which we have not yet managed to extricate ourselves, far from it, which would make Boehner's critique of Obama in this case a bit more apt were anyone to pretend for a moment that Boehner or the rest of his crowd weren't cheerleaders for those wars as Obama was not, or were offering to extricate us from them more diligently than Obama is now (not enough for me, but there remains even here a difference that makes a difference to anybody who cares about facts).

Three times in the quoted passage Boehner implies that cutting government spending yields the result of creating jobs. The clearest statement of the connection is this sentence: "To support job creation in America, we need to keep the cuts coming." But by the time this sentence has arrived he has already made the claim once and he makes it yet again once more afterward. Given how short the passage was it is pretty clear that the endless repetition of this particular Republican piety constitutes the primary substance of Boehner's and the GOP's "case" for what they mean to do this country in the days and weeks and months to come.

It should go without saying that what these "cuts" Boehner is championing literally refer to is the elimination of services and programs that are administered by actual human beings doing a little number called their "job," and hence, whatever else one might think might be happening when one cuts spending, it is literally true that at least one of the most conspicuous things being cut when spending is cut is jobs, and hence that cutting spending is unquestionable job destroying. Literally, incontrovertibly, and flabbergastingly obviously so.

There are obviously economic debates about whether such spending cuts manage to create more jobs elsewhere in the economy to overcome the jobs the cuts also destroy: And I think the series of jobless recoveries, the lowering real wages and standard of living coupled with productivity gains in general, the ongoing shift and concentration of wealth toward the richest of the rich (all of which point to the precarizing effects and downward pressures of conspicuous structural unemployment in epochs of deregulation, privatizing, regressive taxation, and lowered public spending), the endlessly many empirical studies demonstrating the stimulative effect of jobless benefits, food stamps, and comparable programs, the historical record of infrastructure spending in the past (all of which point to the stimulative effects of public spending, ideally paid for in the longer term by adequate revenues although this is a secondary consideration in a deep recession in which we are caught in a liquidity trap for which government spending is one of the few remedies available that do not involve incredibly widespread immediate unnecessary suffering for majorities who are not responsible for most of the mess a nation finds itself in at times like these) all provide ample material reason to believe people who say that cutting public spending creates more jobs in absolute terms are straightforwardly wrong to say that.

But I think it should be enough as a phrase to repeat endlessly in public simply to point out the obvious truth that cutting public spending is destroying the jobs that spending pays for, and so it is obviously true that cutting spending is destroying jobs rather than creating jobs. I think most of the other evidence is also on our side, and I think a clear case can be made for most of it in the give and take of deeper arguments should we be drawn into them.

People feel in their bones and in their everyday lives that public spending diverts economic resources to ensure security and opportunity for majorities so I think these debates are all winnable if only the debates are actually had. I think Rachel Maddow for one provides endless clear examples of the way such cases should be made in public, clear, accessible, while doing justice to most of the complexities at issue.

But be that as it may, I think it would be enough simply to stop this endless Republican repetition of the bulldozing vacuity of "spending cuts = job creation" simply to respond "spending cuts = job destruction," with the justification always waiting in the wings: "because that spending is literally spent paying people for doing indispensable jobs."

Elsewhere in making his idiotic "case" for destroying the country, Boehner claims "Washington's inability to get spending under control is creating uncertainty for our job creators." I know that this probably looks like just another repetition among many of the false and facile Republican connection of "spending cuts equals job creation" which I have already discussed. It is that, but in this variation there is something more that deserves to be highlighted, and by way of conclusion let me just say a word or two about that.

Republicans really do endlessly genuflect to the "Job Creators" to whom we apparently owe so much, to those apparently Randian supermen who must be courted and feted and supported and cajoled, who must be relieved of the burdens of taxation and regulation and uncertainty at every moment. These are the "our job creators" -- our cherished job creators! -- to whom Boehner is referring in his little catechism here.

One wonders why the point is not emphasized more often by Democrats that in making these claims Republicans are clearly declaring their allegiance to the richest of the rich, while at once exposing their comparative indifference and hostility to the great majority of people who actually work for a living. Just as there is an easy and immediate riposte to the declaration that "cutting spending equals job creation," namely, that "cutting spending equals job destruction" it seems to me that every time Republicans cry out "Won’t somebody please think of the job creators!?!" that Democrats should respond that every single person who works for a living is a job creator.

Quite apart from the patent absurdity of declaring richy rich parasites the real, true producers while declaring everybody who literally does all the work of producing anything at all to be the real, true lazy parasites, quite apart from the patent absurdity of the masturbatory cult to these so-called titan corporate CEOs and banksters who piss down your back and tell you it's raining, quite apart from the patent absurdity of Randroidal GOP hard-ons to these would-be stainless steel rugged individualists who also somehow need to be endlessly pampered and petted and reassured lest they retreat delicately forthwith with their imaginary toys into their hidey-holes leaving us bereft of their fabled fabulosity, there remains the scalding abiding truth that in even so notionally representative a democracy as our own there aren't enough of these plutocratic assholes to elect one of them dog-catcher let alone Senator and we the people actually have the power to vote and agitate and organize in our own actual interest the moment we actually respond with clarity and passion to the bullshit they repeat endlessly to the ruin of us all.

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