by Nick Star
Despite the fact that last week’s employment evaluations showed that no jobs were created last month, the most recent federal and private estimates show that US corporations are currently profiting $1.6 trillion per year. I’m a numbers guy so I ran a quick, back of the envelope calculation. To employ the roughly 10 million Americans out of work at $50,000 per year (which is higher than the national median salary) it would cost $0.5 Trillion. According to a Wall Street Journal study last year, corporations were already sitting on an estimated $2 Trillion in cash. This has left me with some questions for the Republican party and the tea baggers.
How much more do they need to make before they are comfortable spending less than 15% of their profits to cut the unemployment rate in half?
The answer is there is no amount. No matter what, corporations will never have enough money to start hiring people again. The reason is not simply that they want to bring President Obama down, and they don’t mind taking the country down with them. There is just nobody to buy their products. No matter how much the taxes of the “job creators” are cut, the public does not have money to upgrade their car, buy a bigger house, or even make repairs to the one they already have. Nor can they go to a movie, have dinner at a local restaurant, or buy flowers at a neighborhood boutique.
This left me with a more philosophical question – Who are the “job creators?” Are the real job creators the stockholders of GM or are they the people buying new Chevy Volts? Are they the capital investors who fund the restaurant or are they the families who eat at the restaurant? Are they real estate investors building new homes or are they the families buying that new home?
And are the job creators the millionaires, whining that only 60% of the new jobs bill that President Obama proposed last week is tax cuts? Or are the real job creators our representatives in the federal government who propose to cut tax loopholes to pay for $200 Billion to hire out of work Americans to rebuild our roads and bridges and to educate our children who do not deserve to be in classrooms with 50 other students – money that those Americans will use to, at the very least, prevent foreclosure on their mortgages. Money that will be used to eat out once a month, go to the occasional movie, and someday, upgrade their car. The capitalist response is that without capital, new business could not be formed, new science not discovered, and new technology not implemented. But what happens when the money has all trickled to the top and is in the form of capital and none is left at the bottom for the populous to buy what the capitalists invest in? The answer: the job holders become the real job creators.
