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"A permanent reduction in capital taxes (read corporate ones ideally to zero) would increase productivity and wages."
False! Productivity increases by getting more production from current work forces, or comparable output from smaller ones. As for wages, they're easily cut during hard times, but don't rise proportionately during upturns.
Why so is clear. Private sector unionization is in disarray. Consider the facts. In 2009, membership fell another 10%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percent of union members overall is 12.3%. The private sector level, however, fell to 7.2%, its lowest state since 1901, a testimony to corporate power, union weakness, and government disinterest in helping.
Given that, continued offshoring good jobs to cheap labor markets, Democrats as anti-union as Republicans, and union bosses collaborating with business against their own rank and file, fair pay increases face stiff headwinds, even during economic growth periods, and during hard times, workers are virtually stripped of all rights.
Ask UAW members about how their leadership sold them out, resulting in plant closings, offshoring, pay and benefit cuts, and mass layoffs, transforming the auto industry landscape into a wasteland, besides enormous damage done throughout US manufacturing since the 1980s, hollowed out from its former industrial strength. Tax cuts did nothing to stop it.
Wrecking the American Dream
For nearly two years, Obama continued the Bush agenda, supporting wealth and power, wrecking the economy, and abstaining from real help for working Americans. The latest way: his December 6 deal with the devil - capitulating to Republicans, the rich and super-rich at the expense of millions in need, getting temporary crumbs, not meaningful permanent relief they deserve.
According to Roberton Williams, Senior Fellow with the Tax Policy Center, his deal "come(s) to a few dollars a week," while lavishing billions on America's elites who deserve higher, not lower, taxes. According to one estimate, members of the top income bracket (those earning over $373, 651 a year) are getting an average $70,000 windfall, the super-rich far more. By comparison, working Americans are offered crumbs, temporary ones that future Republican (and perhaps Democrat) leadership will end whatever economic conditions prevail.
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