Republican's Jobs Bill and Tax Plan

To see a fantastic jobs bills and a fair tax plan that's being presented by the Republican party, just click on the man's nose.

There are no fantastic jobs bills or fair tax plans that are being presented by the Republican party...just more cuts to government workers, government services, and government social programs.

Oh, and more tax cuts for the uber-wealthy, those who have been hoarding the money supply.

Below is taken from an article by Jared Bernstein, who joined the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in May 2011 as a Senior Fellow. From 2009 to 2011 he was the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and a member of President Obama’s economic team.

This was excerpted from one of his most recent posts:

"Critics like those at the Heritage Foundation have used the analogy that stimulus spending is like taking water from one end of the swimming pool and putting in the other end. A dollar that the government spends on stimulus is a dollar someone else won’t be spending, so there’s no net gain.

The swimming pool analogy doesn’t work because it’s static—it ignores the dynamics…the actual moving parts in a real economy. A static economy would be one without cycles—demand would be effectively constant—and you certainly wouldn’t have demand contractions like the Great Recession.

Once you admit such cycles, then the static view disappears. It’s perfectly easy to imagine dollars sitting on the sidelines not getting spent or invested, and millions suffering unnecessarily because of it.

A better analogy is to think of the economy as a car and fuel as the demand that propels the car forward. The gas tank is empty, but we’ve got a tank of gas sitting on the lawn next to the car. If we put the gas in the tank, the car can get started and we can go somewhere -- we took the gas that we had sitting there on the sidelines and used it to get the engine started.

They Republicans are like weathermen in a building with no windows, telling everyone that according to their computer model, it’s a beautiful sunny day, when in fact there’s a hurricane outside."

Excerpted from some of his reader's responses:

"Sometimes these people do not view the economy as a collaborative enterprise, but as a game, as when if other people are unemployed (‘losing’), but they themselves are doing better, then they're 'winning' the game."

"The Circular Flow model is commonly presented on the first day of Macro 101. It’s truly shocking that a bunch of supposedly-sophisticated economists do not seem to understand the most basic ideas about money, like the idea that it is possible for capital to be idle. If some rich person decided to take out a billion dollars in cash from his off-shore bank account and stuck it under the world’s largest mattress, and then the Fed decided to print a billion dollars and give it to the government to spend, how could those folks insist that this was not helping to generate economic activity? And if they don’t argue with that, then how do they argue that moving dollars out of idle reserves into the circular flow is any different?"

Paul Krugman: "Monetary expansion just piles up in bank reserves."

"Why do the Republicans think that cutting jobs is unlikely to result in higher employment and stimulate job growth?" 

"Couldn't taxing the excess that the 1% hoards at least help create more government jobs, and then exponentially create even more jobs, and thereby create more economic activity?" - Bud Meyers

Below: From Rick Sloan, Executive Director, Ur Union of Unemployed 

The New York Times polled the unemployed last week. The newspaper conducted a similar survey in December 2009. Taken together, the polls show a not-so-subtle shift in the attitudes of jobless Americans.

Party identification saw a two point drop for Republicans (now at 18%) and a two point pick up for Democrats (35%) and Independents (40%). 

On which party would be better at job creation, the unemployed answered Democrats (44%) and Republicans (23%). Both parties lost a point since 2009.

Three-fifths of the jobless (59%) have exhausted their benefits or never qualified for benefits. Only 38 percent said they were receiving benefits, down four points in two years.

And that may be why everything else shifted! The glass is no longer half full; it's been drained. 

The unemployed became far more liberal (plus 11 points) and much less conservative (down 5 points) since polled in 2009. 

And the distribution of their education levels has changed - more high school graduates (plus 15 points) and fewer with some college (down 6 points).

But what really shifted was their self-assessment of their class standing:

• In 2009, 37 percent described themselves as middle class. Now, only 22 percent do.
• Two years ago, 17 percent said they were lower class. Now, 27 percent do.
• Those answering working class climbed five points to 46 percent in the last two years. 

No wonder the wrong track numbers have grown from 59 to 71 percent among the jobless. Or that their distrust of government has reached 85 percent! (Only a 9% overall approval rating for Congress).

These Americans are jobless. They're not clueless. They know where the problem lies: in Washington and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

President Barack Obama gets much higher marks. But among the unemployed, even his approval numbers have tanked since 2009:

• Overall job approval has declined from 61 to 40 percent. Disapproval has grown from 29 to 49 percent. 
• On handling of the economy, Obama's approval rating slipped from 57 to 32 percent. His disapproval rating shot up from 35 to 59 percent. 
• On job creation, his approval rating went from 47 down to 29 percent. His disapproval rating hit 60 percent, a 16 point increase since 2009.

What must be unsettling, especially for the White House, the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign, is how deeply disillusioned the jobless are. When three-fifths of the unemployed disapprove of the job you're doing on job creation - even after a ten week campaign to pass the American Jobs Act - it is time to recalibrate your strategy.

In the 2012 presidential and congressional elections, an estimated 40 million voters will come from households where someone has been unemployed in the last four years. Each knows how far down the economic ladder they have fallen.

Finding a way to put millions of them to work is the only strategy that can change their attitudes. Otherwise, the disillusionment now felt by America’s 29.1 million unemployed and underemployed will devastate the political landscape like a massive tsunami a year from now.