Republicans Are Bad For Business

According to this story in The New Republic, business leaders are starting to doubt their allegiance to the Republican Party.

Reason: the Republicans' willingness to endanger the entire economy to score political points, as happened last summer in the insane debt ceiling stand-off, which wound up lowering America's credit rating and affecting the interest rates we all pay. Uncertainty is the enemy of business, and Republicans are using uncertainty as a political weapon.

Besides, recent decades have shown Democratic presidencies are far better for American business than Republican ones.

Bloomberg reports that private sector jobs increase far more under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

"Since Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961, non-government payrolls in the U.S. swelled by almost 42 million jobs under Democrats, compared with 24 million for Republican presidents, according to Labor Department figures.

"Democrats hold the edge though they occupied the Oval Office for 23 years since Kennedy’s inauguration, compared with 28 for the Republicans. Through April, Democratic presidents accounted for an average of 150,000 additional private-sector paychecks per month over that period, more than double the 71,000 average for Republicans."

Business Week reports that investment dollars have yielded five times greater returns across the past five decades of Democratic presidencies than the same period's Republican presidents.

"$1,000 invested in a hypothetical S&P 500 tracking fund beginning when JFK was president and measured only during subsequent Democratic presidencies would have yielded $10,920 by the time the market closed yesterday. Alternatively, $1,000 invested when Richard Nixon was president and measured only during Republican presidencies would have yielded $2,087 on the last day of George W. Bush’s presidency."

USNews reports that Democratic presidents beat Republicans on 11 of 12 economic indicators. The source is a new book written by a business lawyer and the head of a financial services company. When we started writing, we did not cherry pick any of the data," says Deitrick, who said he knew only the stock market data when he began and "had no idea where the rest of the chips would fall."

"It was overwhelming and surprising to see the Democrats win on almost all of the economic indicators," said one of the authors.

Scrooge Lives

From Forbes, a very good examination of the argument over our serious long-term unemployment problem. (Which, by the way, has been deepened and lengthened because minority Republicans in the Congress don't want the economy to improve. You can see why: a better economy improves Obama's chances of being re-elected. Economic pain is a theoretical abstraction to the Republicans, and a very useful one.)

Republicans say people who are out of work are either lazy or picky or on drugs and need a good kick in the pants. They say the unemployed deserve to be unemployed, which by extension means their children deserve to be hungry and homeless.

Scrooge lives.

Here's another good short analysis of the Republican strategy, from the New Republic.

The Republican Party (which just shut the door on the millions of Americans worst hit by the recession Bush left us with) seems to have re-engineered itself as the party of the selfish, the greedy, "the haves and the have-mores" (the folks Bush jokingly referred to as his base). They've devised a cruel mythology to support their argument and have a large well-funded apparatus to push it. Lots of air time at FoxNews, lots of microphones, lots of radio listeners who swallow it whole.

This kind of thinking, this brutal meanness, isn't new to America, but it's never dominated a major party before. That it's also wedded to the loudest Christian groups is more than ironic, but these people are immune to irony. Super-Christianity was also allied with Franco, Mussolini and Hitler in a time that seems increasingly similar to ours.

Something to think about as we watch A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life. Merry Christmas indeed.

Rick Perry Wants More Poor People Working Harder For Less Money and Paying More Taxes

A good article from the Guardian last week points up the flaws in Rick Perry's Texas jobs picture.

Let me see if I understand this: Rick Perry wants more people to be poor, and wants more poor people working harder and longer for less, and wants more poor people paying more taxes so rich people can pay less than they already do which is less than poor people pay.

Nod if you agree.

I get this information from Forbes, by the way. And CNN Money. And the New York Times.

More middle class Americans have become poor in the past ten years, so Bush already accomplished what Perry said he wants to do. And Bush already guaran-darn-teed that very very rich people paid lower income taxes than bus drivers and office managers, making it better to own for a living than work for a living. And all the other Republican candidates agree on this. So what's the fuss about? Why are networks covering this? Instead of covering thousands of protesters on Wall Street...

So, the real Texas story? More jobs but not enough to keep up with the population growth. More jobs but lower paying jobs, more new government funded jobs than private sector ones, and worse conditions in many important categories. In effect, Perry has done to Texas what George W. Bush did to the U.S. Do we need it done all over again?