I wish I could believe that this whole tax rate argument was true, from the republican perspective that is, but evidence shows that jobs go bye-bye regardless of the tax rate. However, this has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The big boy's just ain't gonna' hire until they get their way, and like it or not, they're holding all the cards.
I fail to see what block of voters this will unite. If a majority of voters would like to see the tax cuts end, this isn't going to improve their situation. It's not like their tax increase is my tax decrease. If 50 % of the voters are on food stamps, is this the same 50% of the voters who want to tax the rich? I don't get it.
I don't know! All I do know is that there has been no growth in manufacturing for 30+ years regardless of tax rates. Not only no growth, millions of jobs have been lost. Dead manufacturing equals a dead America. Either manufacturing comes back,(not likely), or these jobs get replaced with something else comparable. Neither is happening.
Agree on that front. I'm trying to establish that if we don't gain anything (or at worse, we lose even more) with higher taxes then raising taxes should be completely off the table as a means of achieving growth. Raising taxes only ever leads to one thing and that's more governmental spending which everyone agrees is out of control. How we tackle the jobs issue is the real challenge. I firmly believe though that the harder our government makes it to comply the worse the problem will become. And when you start talking about higher taxes, or any taxes, people/companies are going to look for alternatives to retain that money.
How anyone can advocate that raising taxes will solve our problems is beyond me. It's like trying to solve for an unknown. Until you know how much money it takes to run an efficient government, you cannot possibly know how much money is needed in taxes. Any logical minded individual would first need to establish efficient spending (on decided programs/departments/policies) and then one could say "alright, in order to achieve this, we need to raise this much revenue". Trying to reverse that process will only continue to throw money down the drain as there is positively no incentive at all to become efficient when someone keeps footing the bill for profligate spending. I would think this should be common sense.
Much of that comes down to our trade policy. Fortune 100 bought off Congress to adopt MFN status for China, and zero tariffs for other low-cost Asian producers. Unions played a role, although to a lesser extent. Free trade isn't fair trade. In a developed country, unit labor cost has to absorb not just a fair wage, but pension contributions, health and medical, work place safety insurance, vacay, regulatory cost etc. China, they have none of that. 2 dollars an hour flat. Free trade between nations of similar labor costs, is doable - Germany, France, Italy, US, Canada, Japan etc. They all share a comparable cost structure. But Mexico? Vietnam? India? These places are incredibly undeveloped with zero protections etc. So it's pure arbitrage. What gets me is this was all foreseeable. Once a competitor offshores, even if you don't want too, if you don't, you go bankrupt. Prisoners dilemma. Congress knew it, and so did Fortune 100. Thing is, the economy underpins national security. Without the dollars, we have no military, not to mention our living standard circles the toilet bowl. So here we have our own fucking Government, exporting over, what? 20 million manufacturing jobs (not to mention those manufacturing jobs that were created AFTER free trade (think Apple's Foxcon etc) that otherwise would have stayed in America, but were immediately offshored to China, so they never show up in the official tally), PLUS the spin off economic activity generated from those jobs. Well over 40 million jobs, I bet. And now, we've got a structural deficit, debt bombs all over the country to fill in this sink hole, and nobody in Congress is doing jackshit about it. Either deregulate and drop the shit out of taxes, or jack tariffs. Or both. Santorum and Paul are right. What does Romney propose to do about it? Fuck all. And Obama? Play class warfare all day. Get the rich. Not that it does anything to promote jobs (it doesn't. It destroys wealth). But it panders to his idiot Liberal base who think the economy is zero sum, when it's not. There's some element of truth to it - yes, the Fortune 100 and Banks own Government and they're fucking us. But not the guy with a shop, employing 30 people, earning 400K a year. These are all misdirected political footballs. Everything happening now, from an employment, globalization, fiscal and debt standpoint makes perfect sense. The US literally exported ~40 million jobs. In it's place, we took on debt. Now the debt party is running out, and the income producing assets (jobs) that would otherwise support our cushy, first world lifestyle, were mostly outsourced. So we have to accept "austerity" because the jobs that would otherwise finance our social spending - medicare, obamacare, social security, UE etc - are all in China and India. The tax base to pay for all this shit is overseas. This is not rocket science. These mutherfucking politicians and their Corporate Masters knew exactly what they were doing.
According to the capitalist model you're supposed to own the companies that have offshored, and so have benefited from the higher margins that yields. You blame government, but you should be blaming what I call the "non-resident" shareholder model which demands and requires this process and anything and everything like it, legal or not, which pays the rent on their money. Edit: just noted your use of "corporate masters", so I'm now more in agreement with you.