Yesterday the Republicans again filibustered the payroll tax cut extension. They continued their argument that paying for it with a surtax on millionaires would hurt hiring. NPR decided to look further into that claim and here’s what they found:
We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.
So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to. A group called the Tax Relief Coalition said the problem was finding someone willing to talk about their personal taxes on national radio.
So next we put a query on Facebook. And several business owners who said they would be affected by the “millionaires surtax” responded.
“It’s not in the top 20 things that we think about when we’re making a business hire,” said Ian Yankwitt, who owns Tortoise Investment Management.
And of course it doesn’t affect hiring. What does affect hiring is DEMAND. But I’m not going to go into that rampage again. Instead I’m going to go into another one – trickle down.
What the GOP’s position is is nothing more than an embrace of the old Reaganomics trickle-down theory. That theory was debunked in the 80’s and early 90’s. As matter of fact it was debunked so bad that the GOP even stopped using the phrases “trickle-down” and “Reaganomics” to describe it, but the idea hasn’t died. This highly failed policy has become the bedrock of GOP economic philosophies.
This article is a real telling of how failed this policy is. The GOP has made the claims for decades that businesses hire solely based upon the money they have, totally ignoring supply and demand. Yet when it comes time to prove their claims they never can, as opposed to the troves of business owners who have come forward and said the GOP claims are wrong.
The GOP is delusional in economics and their policies are what helped lead us to this economic crisis. Remember, our unemployment skyrocketed to the current level with the “job creators” paying the lowest tax bracket in the history of our nation. What’s next – no taxes for these people? Hell, why don’t we just impose a law that every worker needs to give a percentage of their paycheck back to their employer?
The Republican Party is driven by nothing more than greed and that greed translates into a desire to destroy America’s middle and lower class. Yesterday’s filibuster is yet further proof of this, costing the struggling American workers an average of an extra $1,000 next year in taxes. Think about that over the holidays and next year be sure to thank the GOP for making you struggle a little more.