Inequality Reforms, Not Capital Investment

200

senator Marco Rubio’s new report on American Investment in the 21st Century leaves quite a bit to be desired by the average economist let alone the average thinking American.

Rubio starts off with a complaint that China has found its way to the dark side of the Moon which somehow is supposed to indicate, apparently that we, the first on the Moon, have fallen behind the rest of the world.

First of all, we decided not to go to the Moon again. Second, in 2001, 2003, and  2017 we gave billionaires the money we would or could have spent on going to the Moon. If they want to go to the moon, they are welcome to go. But the United States can no longer afford to go to the Moon nor can it afford a class of people who want us to cut their taxes by sacrificing public services, like Social Security. which we all paid in to have for for our retirement.

The report says that the first and foremost problem is that corporations are not investing their profits into long-term investments. In addition corporations are spending too much time appeasing their stockholders. Again while both of those things may be true, to some degree, a far greater problem is mergers between the largest firms in each industry.

This inevitably leads to oligopolist control in almost every key business category, with literally a handful of corporations manipulating competition, prices and suppressing wages.

Here’s what Rubio says about public vs private investment, capital investment.

“There is a public interest in the non-financial business sector, instead of the financial
sector or the government, being the primary investor in our future productivity.”

First of all, the public sector is bleeding $1 trillion a year because of the tax cuts that Rubio and his Republican pals hung around our necks. So, he is right about that. The private sector is the only place that has any money at all. But Rubio needs to look to his fellow Republicans and in the mirror.When the GreatTrump Tax Cuts brought trillions of dollars to the United States, corporations were supposed to invest that money in long-term growth investments. They didn’t.

Since the tax cuts, managements of major corporations have used those funds, taxed at next to nothing, to buy up their own stock, enhancing its value and the value of their own options. He’s right about one thing. It’s great for stockholders, not so good for the rest of us. But Rubio knows this. People like his fellow Senator, Bernie Sanders, have been railing about this on the floor of the Senate, predicting exactly what would happen when these funds were “repatriated” at negligible tax rates.

So what could the Senator do? Well, when only one of the CEO’s of the top 50 corporations in the country said that they needed or wanted a tax cut, he could have listened. When corporations were buying back their stock, he could have supported legislation to stop it. He didn’t. And instead of allowing corporations to run roughshod over workers and unions to help alleviate the problems of worker wages and increased income inequality, he could have supported any number of bills, like the minimum wage increase to $15 an hour, which the economists all say does not even keep up with inflation.

Senator Rubio wants to be President some day. He says the popularity of the President among his lapdog followers especially his his state where apparently illiterate seniors voted to elect a man, Rick Scott, first to the Governors office and then to the Senate. Scott, who as president of a health care company cheated Medicare out of millions of dollars, then supported Trump’s tax plan, which will result, n 2020, in cuts totaling over $1 trillion to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Here’s another quote from the report

GARY COHN, DIRECTOR OF THE WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL
ECONOMIC COUNCIL:

“…we want companies to invest back in the economy, not give money back, or sit on
money..We think there should be an enormous amount of opportunity in the economy right now to invest capital into our economy…the reason they’re not doing it is because it’s really hard…”

If Gary Cohn, who works for Trump, who has a Republican Senate and a House willing to do anything to help raise wages and stimulate private investment, wants he could get that done tomorrow. The reason Rubio quoted Cohn is that he knows Cohn doesn’t mean it. He’s one of Trump’s big point men on lying to the hicks.

Rubio’s report quotes Cohn because he knows that Cohn is merely pretending to be a real economist.In reality he is just being the worst kind of lying politician. You don’t have to be a Senator to know these things. You only have to know how to count and read and understand that when someone lies to you ten times, you probably shouldn’t believe him the eleventh time.

Cohn has been a non-stop advocate for Trump’s policies, including all those that tell Americans they iwill have better health care when in reality, if elected, Trump’s plan is basically the old Republican plan, which is both dangerous to the health of Americans and could be disastrous for their pocketbooks.

Rubio thinks that pulling a Trump will get him elected but it won’t. There is only one liar like Trump. Rubio is far from smart enough or even practiced enough to carry it off. He might get away with it in Florida, where people are too busy gazing directly at the Sun. But not in Iowa or Illinois. Nice try, Senator, but you just haven’t got the creds to pull it off.

 

 

 

 

th