Hillary Clinton’s remarkable denial that corporations create jobs in the course of a campaign speech for Martha Coackley in Massachusetts last Friday produced sufficient mockery and loud guffaws that Hillary was yesterday at pains to revise and extend her remarks.
Hillary Clinton tried her best on Monday to walk back her controversial economic body-slam from a speech on Friday, explaining away her claim that it’s not ‘corporations and businesses that create jobs.’
The talking point three days later: ‘So-called trickle-down economics has failed. I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades.â€
“Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in America and workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out – not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.’
But the damage has been done. Conservatives have a new rally cry – ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s, you know, corporations and businesses that create jobs,’ she said – and campaign consultants will have a new advertisement drawn up if Clinton runs for president in 2016.
————————-
————————–
Alinsky-ite propagandists like Hillary decry the idea that limiting the percentage of a nation’s economic wealth confiscated and squandered by government leaves more capital available for investment and increases the likelihood that that nation’s economy will grow, and socialists smear the notion that a growing economy raises all boats by applying the derisive term “trickle-down economics.”
When people like Hillary sneer at the idea of capitalistic growth as “trickle-down economics,” they are, in fact, shamelessly denying the obvious history of their own country, the same history which Hillary herself lived through a significant piece of, right along with the rest of us.
Just compare the condition of a working-class family a hundred years ago with the condition of a similiarly-situated family today. In 1914, chances are that a working class family used an outhouse, lighted their home with a kerosene lamp, heated their home with the cookstove in the kitchen, owned no automobile, and (obviously) did not enjoy air-conditioning or computers. It’s actually pretty amazing all the stuff that has trickled down from the once-upon-a-time point when they either constituted fabulous luxuries available only to the rich, or were not yet even existing at all, to becoming routine features of the life of practically everyone.
It was remarked with a certain amount of bemusement, back in 1991, during the Los Angeles Rodney King riots, that, in America, when the poor riot, they leave air-conditioned homes, with computers and color televisions behind, and get in their cars to drive downtown in order to riot.
So-called “trickle-down economics” may not be as speedy in results as rubbing a magic lamp and making a wish, but that kind of economics really has, over just a few generations, made ordinary people richer in many ways than kings and emperors used to be.
The alternative to “trickle-down economics”, of course, is socialism. There are plenty of well-known examples as to just how effective in promoting general economic well-being all the best exemplars of Hillary Clinton’s preferred Robin Hood “Steal-from-the-rich-and-give-to-the-poor” economic philosophy have proven: Argentina, Cuba, North Korea, the late Soviet Union.
Appearing on Friday at a Boston rally in support of behind-9-points-in-the polls Democrat gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley at the Park Plaza Hotel, Hillary Clinton dismissed the idea that businesses create jobs. I guess Hillary must simply be projecting her family’s life experience, that all wealth is derived from politics, onto universal reality.
Kevin Williamson wrote a terrific essay debunking the standard communist propaganda about inequality purveyed by Paul Krugman.
I live in the same city as Donald Trump, so the existence of rich people with toxic taste is not exactly a Muppet News Flash for me. But poor people are not poor because rich people are rich, nor vice versa. Very poor people are generally poor because they do not have jobs, and taking away Thurston Howell III’s second yacht is not going to secure work for them. Nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily answer the question for me: How would making Donald Trump less rich make anybody else better off?
There is, obviously, one direct answer to that question, which is that making Trump less rich by seizing his property and giving it to somebody else would make the recipients better off, and that is true. But the Left does not generally make that straightforward argument for seizing property. Rather, they treat “inequality†as though it were an active roaming malice on the economic landscape, and argue that incomes are stagnant at the lower end of the range because too great a “share of national income†— and there’s a whole Burkina Faso’s worth of illiteracy in that phrase — went to earners at the top. It simply is not the case that if Lloyd Blankfein makes a hundred grand less next year, then there’s $100,000 sitting on shelf somewhere waiting to become part of some unemployed guy in Toledo’s “share of the national income.†Income isn’t a bag of jellybeans that gets passed around.
Further, if your assumption here is that this is about redistribution, then you should want the billionaires’ incomes to go up, not down: The more money they make, the more taxes they pay, and the more money you have to give to the people you want to give money to, e.g., overpaid, lazy, porn-addicted bureaucrats.
Limitations on immigration (not required by National Security) are nothing other than a species of Protectionism, a way of limiting labor market competition.
Funeral of my grandmother’s brother, Joseph Skarnulis, killed in Tunnel Ridge Colliery, Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1905. While crossing the breast to see if the manway was open, a fall of coal caught him, killing him instantly. My Aunt Rose (born 1901 — died 1988) is the little girl at the head of the coffin. My Aunt Ann (born 1900 — died 2000) is the little girl peeping over the coffin to her left. My grandmother, Martha, is the lady with the big hat cut in half by the break in the photo. My grandfather, George Zincavage, is the fellow with the droopy mustache to her right.
Commenter Chris writes:
1. We control our border. If we cannot do this what’s the point of being a nation
“Controlling our borders” is a slogan. In reality, the United States has thousands and thousands of miles of border passing through uninhabited, empty wilderness which any really determined person can cross. We can’t control those borders completely because the economic cost of doing so would be ridiculous and the benefit trivial. We can’t control our borders perfectly for the same reason nobody can conquer Afghanistan: It would be a tremendous waste of money, so no one is ever going to do it.
Some loons want to built a barbed wire fence all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. What a noxious symbol of statist irrationality and inhumanity that would be! We’d have our own Berlin Wall, but enormously longer, where we could shoot people for trying to come here in order to better their lives, instead of for trying to escape.
2. We DO NOT implement Amnesty. What point is having laws on the books if we’re going to abrogate them whenever we please?
The problem with this argument is that existing immigration rules embody no real principles, serve no specific purposes, and reflect no real national consensus. They represent only this particular edition of bureaucratic modification cobbled together during a period of national confusion and bitter political division.
Why should anybody give a rat’s rear end if somebody else violates a basically unprincipled, ill-considered, and fundamentally pointless regulation? Personally, I want to see my lawn mowed, my roof fixed, and the world’s work in general done as well and as economically as possible. I don’t really care about the genealogy or national origin of the guy cutting my grass or picking the apples I buy. If the steak I buy at the local Bistro is more affordable because the busboy and the guy washing the dishes snuck into the country to take those jobs, I think that’s just great, and I wish those Hispanic gentlemen the best.
3. Deport those illegals involved in Criminal activity.
I can go along with that one, though I’d personally prefer no laws on the books criminalizing victimless crimes.
4. Prosecute any company paying less than minimum wage to their employees (not sure that’s even an issue)
If I were on the Supreme Court, I’d write you a ruling explaining why government interference with voluntary contracts between one American or one business entity an another are unconstitutional and are economically deleterious to society. There is no such thing as a just price other than a price voluntarily agreed to between to parties. The imposition of fixed pricing by law represents the illegitimate intrusion of governmental force on behalf of one party to the injury of another and of the whole of the rest of society.
Do those 4 things there won’t be a need for amnesty, because in a generation everyone here illegally will be eligible for some form of legal immigration, either through anchor babies, marriage etc.
My wife immigrated here from Canada. We got caught in the 86 amnesty legalization surge and a process that took 3 months ended up taking 3 years because of the volume of illegals that gained legal status. That’s BS of the first order that!
This has nothing to do with race but with FAIRNESS. What you are advocating is unfair to those that cannot run, jump, or swim the border. Why should Hispanic illegals get any preferential treatment? Get in line if you want to come here…. everyone else had to.
This is the Michelle Malkin argument. The problem with it is that compliance with unprincipled and essentially useless regulations really benefits nobody. What we ought to want is what’s good for the country. What’s good for the country is the free flow of willing and affordable labor and all benefits of a continued population increase comprised of the most dedicated, energetic, and ambitious citizens of foreign lands. I want my lawn mowed. I want my fruit and vegetables picked. I want low-skill jobs done cheap. I don’t care if the guy doing them said “Simon says” or stood in the proper line or filled out the right forms.
Even my 9th great grandfather that came over from Wales in 1658.
He stood in line to get here in 1658? I do not understand what you mean.
Kristian Niemietz argues that political correctness constitutes what economists call “a positional good,” i.e., one differentiating you from others and defining your place in the social hierarchy.
PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.
You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs (here’s a nice example). You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense (plenty of nice examples here.) Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.
If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.
Dan Greenfield complains of being attacked by Paul Krugman: the same Paul Krugman, who has done for economics what Erich Von Daniken did for space exploration.
Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong†(a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to bioÂlogical evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.†Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.
Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.†While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,†he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.†Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.â€
The reason for this immortality is simple: The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem. If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.
The following are 40 statistics about the fall of the U.S. economy that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars…
#2 During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
#3 The U.S. national debt is now more than 23 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.
#4 If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
#5 The federal government is stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.
#6 Back in 1970, the total amount of debt in the United States (government debt + business debt + consumer debt, etc.) was less than 2 trillion dollars. Today it is over 56 trillion dollars…
#7 According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#8 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#9 According to The Economist, the United States was the best place in the world to be born into back in 1988. Today, the United States is only tied for 16th place.
#10 Incredibly, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been permanently shut down since 2001.
#11 There are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then.
#12 According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.
#13 When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
#14 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little “m”) for the entire year. In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#15 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975.
#16 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
#17 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#18 At this point, an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year
Charles Hugh Smith discusses the popular liberal meme of widening inequality, and comes to the conclusion that inequality is widening alright, but the beneficiaries of this inequality are actually thoroughly and completely in cahoots with the leftwing administration which, on the one hand, makes political hay using class warfare rhetoric about inequality, while, simultaneously on the other hand, managing economic and central bank policy ruthlessly in pursuit of the interests of the financier sector at the expense of the general community.
Individuals are not powerless to change their circumstance. This is the basis of the American Dream (and also the Chinese Dream, Mexican Dream, Iraqi Dream, etc.) The question then becomes: how is the system “wired,” i.e. what are the obstacles, incentives and disincentives presented to individuals who are trying to better their circumstance?
It’s important to ask this question, and to be honest in our assessment of victimhood, oppression and individual responsibility.
The widening chasm refers to both the income chasm between the financier class (1/10th of 1%) and the 99.9%, and the chasm between the real economy and the official narrative of the economy. The essence of propaganda is to substitute an officially conjured narrative for independent critical thinking.
In the American propaganda narrative, the central state and bank are admirably supporting a “recovery” that though uneven in places is soundly on the path to widespread prosperity.
The primary support of this narrative is ginned-up statistics (bogus unemployment rate, etc.) and asset bubbles inflated by easy credit to the masses and unprecedented low-cost credit to the financier class. These are the basic tools of propaganda: choose a metric that you can control or game, and make that the measure of success.
In the Vietnam War, the body-count of enemy combatants was the metric chosen by the propaganda machine to measure success. Unsurprisingly, stacks of dead civilians were duly counted to boost morale and to mask the failure of the war’s managers.
Nowadays the unemployment rate is the new body-count: a metric that can be gamed to reflect an illusory success. Just erase tens of millions of people from the workforce, count every 4-hour a week job and dead-reckon a few million jobs were created outside the statistical universe (the Birth-Death Model of small business creation) and voila, the unemployment rate magically declines even as the economy and the job market stagnate.
The other metric of choice is the stock market, which has been inflated by central bank policies and identified as the gauge of recovery by a political class anxious to deflect inquiries into its systemic corruption and monumental policy failures.
The official narrative carefully leaves the kleptocracy, crony-capitalism and cartel rentier arrangements firmly in place. As noted above, those benefitting from the cartel-state neofeudalism defend their perquisites as “natural,” i.e. the result of meritocracy. This adds another layer of propaganda persuasion to the official narrative.
An independent, critical account of the American economy would soon raise questions about the structural causes of inequality by asking cui bono, to whose benefit is the system arranged?
If we can honestly say that the system’s primary source of inequality is a dynamic economy that rewards the top 10% who are best able to deploy skills and capital, then that suggests one set of potential remediations.
If however we find the system is unequal largely as a result of its cartel-state structure, then that suggests a political and financial reset is needed to clear the deadwood of corruption, malinvestment and state/central bank manipulation of statistics, finance and credit.
