Job Creation

While Congress indulges itself by playing a partisan game of "chicken" with the debt ceiling, most Americans are more concerned with reducing our unemployment rate and finding ways to get people back to work. The highly romanticized concept that the way to stimulate the economy is to reduce taxes on the wealthy doesn't hold up to inspection. It's called the "Trickle Down" effect and is aptly named when one considers the meaning of the word trickle. The concept revolves around the fantasy that the rich will voluntarily use their money to create jobs if we reduce their taxes. Given the fact that the folks on Wall Street, and many of our large corporations, have been making record profits during the current recession, and are reportedly sitting on trillions of dollars in idle cash, one can only ask where are the jobs?

The best way to create jobs is to get more money into the hands of consumers because businesses can't hire unless they have more customers. During the past several decades enormous amounts of cash have been withdrawn from circulation by the wealthy. Without a method of putting some of that money back in circulation our economy becomes a deadly game of Monopoly, where a small group of individuals end up with most of the money and our free enterprise system bogs down.