Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Princeton University professor Alan Blinder gazes from the bird's eye view of an economy where the modest buy a lot and the rich buy a little, period. Who creates good and services whose demand necessitates proffering jobs that pay incomes? It is all our daily bread, mana from above, not from the hands of risk-taking men, as far as Blinder is concerned:
Let the upper-income tax cuts expire on schedule at year end. That would save the government an estimated $75 billion over the next two years. However, it would also diminish aggregate demand a bit. So, instead of using the $75 billion to reduce the deficit, spend it on unemployment benefits, food stamps and the like for two years. That would surely put more spending into the economy than the tax hike takes out, thus creating jobs.
Blinder's claims confirm that degreed thinking somehow displaces common sense.
Only the vernacular serves, here: unemployment benefits are socio-economic s___ sandwiches. Nothing can make them palatable, let alone any substitute for an American's average income. Living on what comes from the dole queue is just that. The money provides merely enough to get by; and paying bills and groceries doesn't precipitate growth. Yet Blinder would tax the very investors, entrepreneurs and customers of organizations that, with capital the government confiscated, would provide jobs to the unemployment?
If Republicans acknowledge that economic ends depend on political means, however, they hamstring themselves by opposing benefit extensions. Unemployment isn't welfare: most on its rolls wish to be removed as soon as possible. Furthermore, no volume of small, weekly payments will ever reach the size of federal embonpoint squeezed and groped by the politically favored. The right should seek, with a congressional majority, to divest Washington from "stimulus" and trade spending for tax cuts, the only real assurance Washington can give the private sector.
Do employers have good reason to justify their eponymity? I wager Yes. Stagnation won't last for half a decade if free rein is given to enterprise — unemployment would be halved in twelve months.