Where to begin? Start with their reasons for not raising the minimum wage when hard working Americans are already - many of them (as in Boulder and Frisco, CO) having to live in their cars because there is no affordable housing. How are you going to afford an apartment for $1900/month in Boulder or Frisco, CO when your pay is $9 an hour at Starbucks.
Do the Reepo goons have any solid answers for Ellie Reilly - living out of her Subaru because there aren't any affordable homes or apartments in Frisco, CO - where she works?
None of their stupid, ignorant solutions will help a hard worker like Ellie Reilly featured recently in a DPost article on workers in Colorado mountain towns having to live out of their cars because of the lack of affordable housing. What happened? After the 2008 crash which was cause by their same ignorant tax cutting policies and rabid creation of credit default swaps, home builders simply created high end condos for tourists, pricing locals out. Home owners rented rooms and apartments but also mainly for tourists. Teachers, cops and others - like Starbucks baristas - were priced out.
And please spare me the BS that those jobs (like Ellie's barista job) were "only meant to be entry level" when corporations - sitting on over $1.9 trillion, have ceased investing in higher pay jobs. For anyone who needs it spelled out, that translates into a fixed jobs 'pyramid' with only a few great paying jobs at the top, and only middling to low pay jobs making up the bulk. (Made worse by older workers refusing to leave and open up their jobs to the young, because they're still trying to make back the 401k money lost after the 2008 crash.)
The solution to move these folks to better jobs? Tax cuts (in the form of "flat" taxes like Cruz' idiotic 10 percent flat tax - he also wants to abolish the IRS). All the bozos on stage wanted cuts of some form, as well as to "entitlements" in order to also lower corporate taxes. The claim often repeated, especially by Trump, is that the U.S. is the "most highly taxed nation" in the world, which is baloney.
Thus, Trump's, Fiorina's, Paul's, Carson's, Cruz's and Rubio's solutions of cutting taxes to quick start the economy falls under the header of fantasy. Cutting taxes (Rubio also wants to blow $1 trillion on increased defense spending - meaning he'd have to not only cut Medicare, Medicaid, but the military Tricare program too) is only going to increase the debt. (See my citation of the Financial Times analysis of the Bush tax cuts below). The way to more higher earning jobs and productivity is actually to increase taxes.
Authors James Medoff and Andrew Harless (The Indebted Society) indeed showed that as tax rates increase, aggregate demand is enhanced and job output and productivity grows. This is in direct opposition to the specious claims of the tax cutter fetishists like the goons on parade at this GOOPs debate.
At several points I had to even ask wifey if any of these lunatics knew how to do basic math. WIth all their giveaways to the rich (Jeb would give them an average $180k tax cut each) and Rubio and Trump lowering corporate taxes, they wouldn't have a fucking dime left to work with and in fact add trillions to the deficit. Especially Rubio, aka 'the Cisco Kid' , who wants to give a trillion bucks to the Pentagon when they "misplaced" a trillion back in the late 90s. (As former defense analyst Chuck Spinney pointed out to Bill Moyers on one of his 'NOW' PBS shows in 2002). With a chump like this, why would the brass at the Pentagon want anyone else as Prez?
I mean Jeebus Peace! Rubio can't even control his own outlandish spending on his GOP credit card - running it into the red - and he wants to take over the nation's budget? (The Miami Herald fact -checked his insistence he only used the card once. The Herald documented over $1,200 blown at a Miami steak house, plus $275 for one New Year's Eve fling and over $3,800 at assorted Miami gas stations. What? Cubans don't have their own credit cards? Did the punk expect the party to pay for his spending? If not, why not use your own card?
Rubio also blew it with his blurtation that "welders make more money than philosophy majors". But a fact check exploded that canard: welders earn an average of $37k a year and philosophers, $64 k.
This is all stuff the Dems can use to their maximum advantage and if it doesn't inspire class hatred and warfare I have to consign most of the American working class to the walking dead demographic.
Then there was Trump barking about sending 11 million "illegals" back across the border. Kasich tried his best to temper this ntiwit's bombastic blathering - realizing he was handing Hillary or Bernie millions of potential Hispanic votes on a platter. Don't these goons grasp what this sort of rhetoric does and how it plays against their stupid elephant party?
I mean, after Trump then Carson, blurted their solutions for the nation's finances I had to recall JFK's words when he faced Tricky Dick Nixon in the 1960 campaign:
"I run against a candidate who reminds me of the symbol of his party, the circus elephant, with his head full of ivory, a long memory and no vision"
But I'd even question their collective memories, given none of these turkeys on stage in Milwaukee (my home town, btw) seem to have any recollection of what went down before Obama arrived. How Bush busted the budget with his tax cuts and wars of choice, as well as a massive giveaway program to Big PhrmA (in the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003). And then they all want to blame Obama for economic deterioration. WTF are they all blind too, as well as Alzheiumer's- level low on memory?
Any of these tools could have, prior to the debate, gotten hold of the CBO's data on how deficits have been lowered progressively since Obama was elected, including a clear graph, e.g.
What? They can't read graphs? Or maybe they don't want to because it means acknowledging what Obama has accomplished for the nation's economy which their own party and yahoos have failed to do.
Note after an initial spike the most significant lowering of deficits arrived AFTER the cessation of the Bush tax cuts (which the Dems had also unwisely extended for two years). But what it shows is that tax cuts do not work to help the economy. I don't know how much more clearly I can make this, except maybe to refer to the Financial Times own assessment of the Bush tax cuts. Its analysis of Sept. 15, 2010 showed:
"“The 2000s- that is the period immediately following the Bush tax cuts – were the weakest decade in U.S. postwar history for real, non-residential capital investment. Not only were the 2000s by far the weakest period but the tax cuts did not even curtail the secular slowdown in the growth of business structures. Rather the slowdown accelerated to a full decline”
Get that? A full decline! The fucking Bush cuts (which "Jeb!" also wants to renew) did not even "curtail the secular slowdown in the growth of business structures". No - the slowdown "accelerated to a full decline"
And these goobers think THEIR cuts will do any better? What are they drinking? Hell, what are they smoking?
To put the capper on it, the FT analysis observed that:
“during each decade from the 1950s to the 1990s, growth in real gross non-residential investment averaged between 3.5 percent and 7.4 percent a decade. During the 2000s it averaged a mere 1%”
Read the preceding then do so again. And then tell me any of these would-be presidents has anything to offer the American public but more tax cut snake oil which never worked whenever it was tried before. (Note to those with short memories: Even Reagan had to raise taxes after his initial cut frenzy! But his added defense spending to the tune of $2.1 trillion is what converted the U.S. into a major debtor nation, with the largest deficits in history.)
Then there was Jeb Bush whining about the 2 percent growth which is becoming structural but which he believes he can jerk up to 4 percent. Does this moron even know WHY the growth remains at 2 percent? And why no amount of is tax cuts will alter the situation?
The low growth is worldwide and has to do directly with the degradation of energy, meaning what we are getting is resulting in an overall loss or regression in useful net energy. The only thing that will change the outcome is a new form of intense energy (e.g. nuclear fusion) more efficient than the fossil fuels now being used. For more on this issue, see:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/09/44-trillion-in-deficits-by-2024-minus.html
I could go on and on, but it's just as well this is the last parade of clowns and idiots for at least a month. I really don't think most sane citizens would be able to withstand much more bullshit disguised as sober debate.
For a sober debate I guess I will have to tune into the Dem debate on CBS this Saturday!
See also:
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/11/the_gop_is_living_in_a_fantasy_world_every_single_republicans_economic_plan_is_made_of_wishes_and_fairy_dust/
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