Friday, November 08, 2013

Do tax cuts create jobs? Not lately.

The Huffington Post will tell you that tax cuts do not create jobs. It's obvious that would be their position because they're a liberal website. But Forbes? Yes, Forbes Magazine's website actually has at least one article that shows very conclusively that tax cuts have not created jobs. Rather, the tax cuts over the last 30 years have only emboldened corporations to send jobs overseas, increase rent seeking efforts and seek more tax cuts. All this while some of the largest US corporations are posting record profits while paying zero taxes.

Even today, Bloomberg reports that the top 100 billionaires have added $200 billion to their wealth in a year. Yet billionaires expect working people to be grateful to just have jobs, to have wages that just remain flat instead of falling. All this while unemployment remains above 7%. No, you won't hear any talk of raising the minimum by billionaires, at least not as far as I know.

It's interesting to note that the top earners in the list are heads of what can best be described as monopolies. Bill Gates is head of the Microsoft Windows monopoly. Mark Zuckerberg has a near monopoly with Facebook, though Google is gaining fast and will probably overtake Facebook in a few years with Google+. Carlos Slim is head of the biggest telecom company in Latin America, another monopoly.

Monopolies...Interesting that that word even comes up in a discussion about a capitalist world. But those monopolies are not creating jobs. Monopolies destroy jobs by destroying competition. Monopolies arise and are protected by governments because they're easier to control than a thousand or a million little companies. But I digress...

If tax cuts were job creators, we should have full employment by now. But the titans of industry, the de facto, unelected managers of our economy are not interested in creating jobs. They are only interested in adding up numbers, not employees.

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