I like Chris Hayes and I respect his work, but he’s wrong about why Washington DC doesn’t care about jobs. He makes good points in looking at the relatively low unemployment rate in the Washington area and among those with at least a bachelor’s degree. The recovery is proceeding nicely within the circles in which most capitol workers move. But that has next to nothing to do with why Washington DC doesn’t care about jobs.
They don’t care about jobs because the Republicans don’t believe the government should create jobs. Most of them actually believe that the government cannot create jobs. If the government hired four million people to scrape gum off sidewalks, the Republicans would convince themselves that the money needed to pay them could have been used more efficiently in the private sector to create four million better paying jobs. Actually, they don’t just think that could happen, they believe it will happen. If we fire those four million gum-scrapers and return their wages to the rich, the rich will create more than enough jobs to make up for it, and those jobs will be better.
They believe this, so there is no chance that they’ll spend money to employ people directly. They might consider hiring people indirectly by appropriating funds to their favored contractors, but they only like to do that when they have total control of the purse strings. Otherwise, some of the wrong people will get money.
So, the reason that Washington DC doesn’t care about jobs is that the Republicans have too much power.
The Democrats aren’t blameless, but they don’t like to waste time. After a few days, it gets really boring trying to reason with Republicans. Then you just figure out what you can muscle through and you go for that. The Democrats know that they can’t close the unemployment rate because anything expensive enough to work is just going to get voted down in the House or filibustered in the Senate. So, they move on. They focus on other things that they can make progress on rather than sitting around moping and feeling impotent.
That’s it. That’s the whole explanation. The unemployment rate could by 90% in Northern Virginia and it wouldn’t change the basic dynamics. The Republicans are ideologically incapable of using the government to alleviate unemployment and they have just enough power to make sure no one even tries to do that.
And just for a kicker, not that one is needed, they actually like high unemployment because it hurts the president and it keeps labor cheap.
The Democrats know that they can’t close the unemployment rate because anything expensive enough to work is just going to get voted down in the House or filibustered in the Senate. So, they move on. They focus on other things that they can make progress on rather than sitting around moping and feeling impotent.
I disagree with that last part. What progress is the Senate going to make on anything? Other than maybe killing whatever recovery there is by trying to further kill the middle class with their deficit reduction fetish. That aside, I think both you and Hayes are right. It’s all part of the same thing really. All Pukes, and even some Democrats, don’t care about anyone outside their incestuous circle.
I’m not talking about when we controlled both houses of Congress. I mean since Orange Julius became Speaker. And even so, clowns like Kent Conrad had to be dragged kicking and screaming.
I sympathize with your point, yet disagree. I think it’s a claim Republicans would like to make about government, but…
Their beliefs and actions actually insist they believe government must regulate the economy in order to create jobs. Republican policy is highly regulative. For example, the argument that lower taxes for corporations and citizens will increase revenue and solve the problem of diminishing revenue is so enticing to conservative voters because, as the argument goes, less money in the government coffers means more money in citizens/business owners pockets and should help create new jobs, more jobs than in a paradigm with a high tax rate –All that Laffer Curve crap. That’s all we hear about. We should take them at their word.
I grew up with fiscal conservative pseudo-theory derived from a weird interpretation of supply-side economics all based on thought experiments meant to find ideal tax rates. In order to implement this policy, Republicans must care about jobs. (I suppose they might be liars. It’s possible. Wink.)
I think it’s rather too convenient to insist that conservatives don’t believe government can create jobs. It’s a claim that excuses much of their unjust nonsense over the last 30 years.
Actually, it’s all part of the effort to enrich the rich by impoverishing the working class.
As they have already made clear, the party of the plutocracy wants to force the working people of America and indeed the whole industrialized world to accept jobs paying a good deal less than the ones they lost in the collapse of 2008.
Hence their moves to lower or eliminate the minimum wage, to crush unions, to stop unemployment insurance, and so on.
Too, a side benefit of keeping the economy cruddy for anybody not a millionaire or above is that they can reasonably expect the same working class they are hammering to blame it all on Obama and the other Democrats who still control – in a manner of speaking – the senate and to vote for them, party of the rich.
So they crush the working class under their heels and get a sweep in 2012 as their reward.
Meanwhile, it’s perfectly true that bare-knuckle capitalism can and will provide plenty of jobs for the workers, their wives, their children, and even their grandparents.
The plutocrats seek an economy where all those folks without property slave away for 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week, providing mostly products they can’t afford.
Products for the better off and the plutes, themselves.
Sort of like the good old days before McKinley, as some of them have said right out in public.
Fewer Civics and more Bugattis, in other words.
Progressives and socialists seek an economy in which only one adult (not an elderly adult) per family needs to work, and he or she has a job affording plenty of leisure and producing goods or services mostly for the working class, relatively little of society’s effort going to production of special goodies for capitalists and others of the better off.
In other words, more and better Civics and no Bugattis at all.
If you understand these aims you will have no trouble understanding the contrary policies of tea-baggers, libertarians, and fiscal conservatives vs. liberals, progressives, and socialists; of supply siders vs. demand siders, or of Friedmanites vs. Keynesians.
PS, the Democratic senate is impotent because it chose to be.
They had a chance to get rid of the filibuster and go on the offensive with their own initiatives under majority rule.
They chose to retain the filibuster and play defense with it against Republican initiatives, instead.
Given the number of conservadems in the senate, however, this might actually have been wise.
Better to stop conservative Republican initiatives with filibusters than watch the Republicans pass conservative initiatives with the aid of Democratic votes by majority rule.
The missing paragraph: Washington DC (the Village) doesn’t care about jobs because the Village believes what Republicans believe and lobbies for Republican and business priorities. There is no well-funded lobby for either jobs, the middle class, nor the poor in Washington. Even AARP is oriented to those whose image of themselves is upper middle class with sufficient savings for retirement. Institutionally, the media, the lobbyists, and the cocktail party circuit are not oriented toward the government producing jobs — except for their own.
And just for a kicker, not that one is needed, they actually like high unemployment because it hurts the president and it keeps labor cheap.
you are absolutely correct on both points.
first point, Rachel Maddow made this observation when she did her piece about all these Governors turning down the money, and that No GOPer is going out refuting the various sources about how many jobs will be lost if the GOP Budget gets its way. From Orange Julius’ ‘SO BE IT’ to everyone else’s silence, they KNOW jobs will be lost and don’t give a shyt, because they plan on blaming POTUS.
as far as Labor Cheap , amen. I don’t understand why the working class man doesn’t get this.
Full employment is only the goal of one party. Given our 18th century political madisonian political institutions, nothing can get done unless both parties agree on overarching goals. So we’ll never get full employment, and this dynamic won’t end until the Republican coalition of southerners, rich people, corporations, religious conservatives and old white people no longer has the power to shape (or at the very least veto) the agenda. That coalition may crumble in the wake of tea party revolts, crushing defeats in 2012 or it may endure another 20 years until the boomers have moved on.