Lately, whenever I hear Majority Leader Eric Cantor open his mouth, I look around for something to throw at him. The man never tells the truth. And the lies he tells are particularly infuriating. Here he is telling us that Republicans, a.k.a. Job Creators, really want all of us to make more money.
“We know in this country right now that there is a complaint about folks at the top end of the income scales, that they make too much and too many don’t make enough,” Cantor said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, toning down his earlier criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
“We need to encourage folks at the top of the income scale to actually put their money their work to create more jobs so we can see a closing of the gap,” he added…
…Republicans “are about income mobility,” Cantor said as he tried to make the case that the GOP was best equipped to spread the wealth. “And that’s what we should be focused on to take care of the income disparities.”
Cantor fell short of apologizing for calling the protesters “angry mobs” last week. Still, he did not accept host Chris Wallace’s challenge to stand by his comment against a movement that 54 percent of Americans rate positively according to a recent Time poll.
“I think more important than my use of that word is the fact that there is a growing frustration out there across this country (that) too many people are out of work,” he said. “But … we have elected leaders in this town who frankly are joining in an effort to blame others rather than focusing on the [Democratic] policies that have brought the current situation.”
Republicans want to “promote income mobility and not excoriate some who have been successful,” Cantor said. “We want success for everybody.”
Let me start out by saying that Democratic policies did not cause our current unemployment situation. But the issue is income disparity. Take a look at this chart that lists the top marginal income tax rate for every year since the federal income tax was introduced in 1913. The top rate in the 1940’s and 1950’s was never below 80 percent. Right now it is 35 percent. Under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the top rate was never lower than 91 percent. Why is that important?
I’ll tell you why. If you are a Board of Directors that is trying to decide how much to pay your CEO, are you going to be interested in giving him a whole bunch of income when 91% of it is going to go straight to the government? No, of course not. Until the emergence of the stock option as a form of executive compensation, high marginal tax rates kept a lid on the potential income disparity between the people in the executive offices and the people in the mail room. In the 1980’s, rich people figured out that they could award each other vast sums in stock options, which would theoretically act as an incentive for CEO’s to run their companies well so that the stock price would go up, they could exercise their option, and then they could buy a really big boat. In reality, it just gave them an incentive to always take the short-view, hoping to quickly boost the stock price, make a windfall, and then move on to the next challenge.
But the stock option wasn’t the only trick they came up with. They also capped the long-term capital gains tax rate at 15%, which is considerably lower that the 35% marginal tax rate CEO’s face on ordinary salary income. Why give your CEO more salary that will be taxed at 35% when you can give him more stock options that will be taxed at 15 percent?
About that 35 percent? They brought the marginal tax rate down to 70% (Nixon), 50% (Reagan), 31% (Reagan), and 39.6% (Clinton), and finally to the 35% (Bush II) rate, where it remains today. To be sure, not all of these cuts were equal. The second Reagan tax cut eliminated massive loopholes and didn’t represent as big of reduction as it might seem. But all of these changes made it more attractive and affordable to offer ever-bigger compensation packages to senior executives.
Of course, more pay is more pay, whether you distribute it equitably or you lavish it only on senior management. With increasing global competition, there is great downward pressure on the price of labor. And that is precisely why the Republican Party hates labor unions and anyone who makes labor more expensive. These fat cats keep telling us that we have to renegotiate our contracts, give away our pensions, trim our benefits, or they’ll have to lay people off. Or maybe they’ll just move our jobs to India or Indonesia or Mexico. Yet, they never trim their own ballooning salaries or fail to interfere to prevent a higher tax burden for themselves.
Eric Cantor doesn’t want people to make more money. That’s a crazy idea. He wants labor costs as low as they can possibly be. And that’s on a good day. Right now, he doesn’t even want people to be paid poorly. He wants them not to be paid at all. He wants high unemployment because he hopes it will hurt the president’s reelection prospects.
And,
yet, he has the gall to say that his party wants income mobility. Whatever he’s pretending to mean by that, the truth is that he wants your income to go into rich people’s pockets. That’s about all he wants.
Good post. I wonder if congressmen have people in their offices that keep track of their bosses’ mentions on blogs (left leaning or right) on a regular basis? I imagine they must. At least for the younger ones who aren’t intimidated by computers and internets and series of tubes.
I also wonder why the DCCC can’t ever find anybody to seriously run against Cantor on this exact message…
at free-trade agreements.
Now, I suppose you are saying that Clinton never repealed Glass-Steagall on Christmas eve.
Wow.
We have met the enemy.
but as for booman, I will take him downtown to Chinatown on free trade agreements, and a whole lot more. I am so done with this place. Why don’t you and driftglass clink glasses on awlaki’s assassination by President Star Chamber? We treated Dillinger better.
Talking to the left is perhaps worse than talking to the right. This realization is horrifying.
And yet? Say things out loud, and Booman won’t get it. He’s like George Will. They never get it.
Compound F, I understand the frustration. It’s not easy when the options are bad and not-as-bad-and-sometimes-good.
So on civil rights: Eisenhower bad. Kennedy, not-as-bad-and-sometimes-good.
On free trade agreements: Most Republicans, bad. Most Democrats, not-as-bad-and-sometimes-good.
On universal health care: Republicans, bad. Democrats, not-as-bad-and-sometimes-good.
I think Jesse Jackson hit the right balance when he spoke earlier this year at the King Center/AFL-CIO Joint Conference on Jobs, Justice and the American Dream:
“In 1960 Martin Luther King supported Kennedy instead of Nixon to prevent America from going backwards.
Then he marched in the streets of Birmingham to pass the Civil Rights Act to move the nation ahead.
In 1964 Martin Luther King supported Johnson instead of Goldwater to prevent America from going backwards.
Then he marched in Selma to pass the Voting Rights Act
to move the nation ahead.
For Dr. King there was no conflict between voting strategically to prevent the triumph of reaction and leading a nonviolent mass movement to pressure a president to achieve profound social change.
When we in the movement struggled for social justice we helped weak presidents become stronger.
When we in the movement struggled for social justice we helped good presidents become great.”
Words worth recalling in the week we dedicate the MLK Memorial.
respond along the usuals. We are in new times. You make me wanna cry.
I’m sorry; that’s not my intent (to make you cry).
My intent is to remind all of us (myself first), that our history is not all bad…and getting worse all the time.
Remembering that voting rights legislation was not on Lyndon Johnson’s or the Democratic Party’s agenda for 1965 (they felt they’d done more than enough by passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act); and that SNCC, CORE, SCLC and the NAACP were not only able to put the issue on the table, but to get major legislation passed in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, gives me hope.
It helps me look at something like Occupy Wall Street and think:
1 – Hey! Three months ago all anyone in Washington wanted to talk about was deficit reduction and now they’re all talking about jobs and income inequality. Granted, Obama put forward a bill and has campaigned for it, but these kids are onto something—and they’re making an impact.
2 – Yeah, OWS is young, chaotic, disorganized, unrealistic and makes rookie mistakes. But the same was true for every great social justice movement we now celebrate.
3 – This struggle needs leaders and followers who will be in it for the long haul. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that we have a Voting Rights Act because Ella Baker bought a bus ticket for Bob Moses and sent him to all (about a dozen) of her old NAACP field secretary contacts from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana to recruit young people for what became the founding conference of SNCC in April 1960.
Moses met Amzie Moore (one of Baker’s contacts) who, in Moses’ retelling, was perhaps the one person in American at that time who understood two things:
that organizing for the *vote in Mississippi could be the strategy that would break the back of Jim Crow, and;
*that if the energy, idealism and dedication of the young people who had started the lunch counter sit-ins could be focused on Mississippi, they could drive a stake through the heart of Jim Crow.
Moses returned to Atlanta, reported to Ella Baker, went back to New York to honor his teaching contract. Then, as he had promised Mr. Moore, he returned to Mississippi and worked for the next four years as SNCC’s lead organizer working with leaders like Mr. Moore and Mrs. Hamer for the vote.
It’s my belief that the “powers that be” dislike and distrust that kind of history because it is subversive of their power. Far better for them to have people believe that change is not possible, or that change is not worth working for unless the results will be perfect and everlasting.
I recall it, not to make excuses for President Obama, Booman, myself or anyone else. I recall it because it’s proof that:
1 – the “world as it is” is not the “world as it should be”, and;
2 – acting together, we have the power to make, not a perfect world, but a better one…and therefore we should (act, that is).
don’t let the door hit you on your way out
Well, you’re right that Clinton has some responsibility for what happened over the last decade on Wall Street, but I guarantee you that that is not what Cantor has in mind when he blames the Democrats for high unemployment. Some things get left out in the interest of brevity and getting to the point.
My point here is that nothing that Obama and the Democrats have done has made unemployment worse.
that appeared recently in New York Magazine:
The gist of the article is that Cantor is not really a right wing ideologue but merely ambitious – which of course makes his obstruction of the governmental process all the more horrifying.
totally on point about that weasel