And when you fire them, businesses lay people off.
It's the same with wages: Raise them for the middle class and they'll spend the money, which increases employment. The competition for workers will cause wages ro rise. But if you let the median income fall with each passing year, jobs and wages will keep withering away.
Why aren't we adding more government jobs? Because the wealthy patrons of our political system don't want to pay more in taxes. That's why the Republicans keep pushing illogical economic crack to an audience of wealthy addicts. And this kind of crack makes other people waste away, while the addicts stay fat and happy.
The President does want to raise taxes on the wealthy, but not to anything near the level they paid during most of the last century. And he accepted his party's nomination for a second term without even mentioning the jobs bill he introduced last year -- a bill which Congress rejected, even though it was watered down with relatively unproductive tax breaks to placate the wealthy.
In our wealth-dominated political discourse neither our leaders, nor our candidates, nor our media had much to say about the latest census figures, either. They tell us that median family income is has fallen roughly 8 percent, or $4,400 per year, since the Great Recession began. And that happened while, as Jared Bernstein notes, "the share of income going to the top fifth was the highest on record." (And, as Bernstein explains, that's without counting the capital gains income that contributes significantly to the income of the most wealthy.)
Nothing will change unless the public demands action. If not our leaders will continue to address the concerns of the 1 percent rather than the 99 percent. The pythons will keep getting fatter, and rest of us will have nothing better to do than keep sifting through their crap looking for Rat McNuggets.
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