The Country Needs Jobs: Wealthfare Doesn't Create Jobs

It's time we got past the fantasy that tax cuts for rich people and rich corporations are necessary to create jobs. Every attempt at increasing employment will be doomed to fail as long as tax cuts for those who don't need them are the starting point.

Let's say Company A pays nothing in taxes on its profits. Does Company A feel any need to put money back into the economy, or to grow its own business and hire more people? Absolutely not. Because it pays no tax, it can keep all it makes and pay its top execs obscene salaries and bonuses and tell the rest of the country to buzz off. Thanks in major part to the Ayn Randian Objectivist taint that has infected politics and political discourse in the U.S. these days, this is what we have to live with.

Company B, on the other hand, is taxed at a reasonable but much higher rate than Company A's 0%. In order to avoid paying any more tax than they have to, the management of Company B is way more likely to plow profits back into the company, expanding their business and creating jobs, which tends to reduce government debt by generating even further tax revenue.

The idea that taxes must be cut for the wealthy, whether individuals or corporate "citizens," in order for jobs to be created for the rest of us is a lie. Or, more accurately, another lie in a long string of destructive and costly lies inflicted on the American public in the last decade. The truth is that job-creators will not create schitt unless they are facing a threat to their profits that can be mitigated only by growing their businesses and hiring people. If they have another alternative, they are going to keep their money and thumb their nose at the society that made them rich in the first place. Personal and corporate wealth is the result of a vibrant, robust economy, not the cause of it.

I used to consider the sick state of the economy and politics in the U.S. to be largely the result of greed. There is indeed greed involved, but it seems more and more to be a symptom of the process than a cause. With the leadership of our conservative faction having been enchanted by the soulless materialism of Ayn Rand's Supermen, and due to their very effective crushing of opposing ideas in the media, the U.S. is teetering on the brink of both a depression and a descent into modern-day fascism.

Altruism is defined by Merriam-Webster.com as:
1: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others.
2: behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species.

Altruism, along with religion, is defined by Ayn Rand and her disciples as: Evil.

Rand's philosophy does not object to caring for others. It is a "personal choice," however, that is acceptable only when practiced on that basis. It is wrong, for instance, for a government to decree that the unfortunate members of its society are to be cared for by the rest. Rand rejects the idea that human beings are somehow obligated to help their fellow humans.

This is not a world I want to live in. But it is the world that the Republican wrecking crew want for all of us, because it will allow their backers to run amok with no accountability. And, as odious as I find Ayn Rand, that is actually a perversion of her basic Objectivist principles.