Cents and Sensibility

In a prior blog I suggested that job creation is a function of market conditions rather than taxation. If there is a market demand for a businessman’s product or service, he will add jobs when needed to meet that demand and capture the available profits. He will not wait untill January 2011 to see if the Bush tax cuts are extended. This is little more than common sense. But isn’t the supposition that extending the (heretofore statistically ineffective?) Bush tax cuts will inspire a marked improvement in the market conditions for job creation a different level of sophistication in understanding and applying macro-economics and the esoterica of taxation theory? I and I suspect most regular folks don’t possess this level of prescient economic sophistication. So how did this belief become so prevalent that many in the Tea Party consider it a truism? How can you explain an inconsistency of reasoning that allows people to know there was a surplus after the eight years of the Clinton Administration and a trebled deficit after eight years of the Bush Administration; that there was lower unemployment under the Clinton tax rates and higher unemployment under the Bush tax rates, and yet still propose to extend the Bush rates rather than revert to the Clinton rates? Again, only a very sophisticated and credible but easily comprehensible economic line of reasoning could overcome the clarity of hindsight and the natural inclination of common sense. Has any such argument been advanced? If not, why are the middle class, the promised beneficiaries of a tax cut, out in the street protesting? Are we to believe that all on their own, without advanced economic erudition, they chose to spontaneously rise up and sublimate their own interests, and organize and mobilize a grass roots political movement to sustain the Bush tax rates because of a compelling fiscal need to assuage the financial interests and feelings of the wealthy? Really? And then ask yourself, what ingenious and multifarious effort was required to induce the middle class to even conjecture that universal health care is adverse to their interests? It is not my intent at this time to pass judgment whether it is or not, but doesn’t it seem likely that on its face such a program focused on the cost of health care would appeal to the middle class? How then did so many, so quickly, become so vociferously convinced that it is not a benefit, but a threat? This, simply, is not an expected middle class attitude. To foster such a counter-intuitive middle class position requires sophisticated knowledge, analysis, and maieutic persuasion not typified by any Tea Party member, leader, or argument with which I am familiar. Still, somehow that view has taken hold.

Often, incorrectly, my opinions are construed as mean-spirited attacks on cherished ideologies. My actual thesis is that in the ordinary course of our pedestrian political lives, ideology is a can of Spam, marketed and promoted using the same techniques used to sell other processed meat. But in the interest of space and to allow for personal reflection, I will open my thesis for further inspection with this simple question, “Are the sudden advent of the Tea Party and the Citizens United decision coincidental”? It takes a lot of money to convince a populace eighty years into the mutualism of Social Security, forty years into the mutualism of Medicare, and five years into the Prescription Drug Benefit, that these programs are bad, and that the whole attitude of mutualism is offensive and so detrimental to the interests of the Middle Class as to require rejection of Universal Health Care. Again, I am willing to be economically enlightened, but at this point I’m not. I personally have not heard anything from the Tea Party other than superficial talking points. And I just can’t help but wonder what has happened to cause this semester of the Middle Class to reject what their predecessors embraced as Middle Class interests. Is it just coincidental that a movement funded by Supreme Court approved billionaires has so radically changed the political landscape? My enquiring mind wants to know!