Dismantling Democrat Pseudo-Economic Talk
FreedomWorks takes apart Jim Webb’s lunatic response to the State of the Union Address, demonstrating just how little Democrats understand about economic issues, even compared to their Republican counterparts (which is pretty bad).
I won’t paste the whole article here, just a couple points:
“The first relates to how we see the health of our economy how we measure it, and how we ensure that its benefits are properly shared among all Americans.”
The problem is not one of “sharing” (also known as “socialism”), as though wealthier Americans are somehow grabbing an “unfair” share of the national economic pie. In fact, high-earning Americans already pay a disproportionate share of income to the federal government. According to the Tax Foundation, in 2005 the top 25 percent of wage-earners paid 83.6 percent of the nation’s income tax. The bottom 50 percent of wage-earners paid only 3.6 percent of the total income tax burden. Attempts to extract even more money from top earners—the highly educated professionals and entrepreneurs—is unfair and damaging to America’s overall competitiveness.
Having said that, median incomes have mostly stagnated over the past five years, and Republicans have done a terrible job addressing the insecurities of pocketbook voters. The problem is overregulation (especially in energy, health care, and telecom markets), runaway lawsuits, rising state, local, and, in some cases, federal taxes, and the failure of K-12 public education, which leaves one-half of America reading on an eighth grade level.
As always, the government’s solution to having meddled too much in the market is to meddle even more, since the people we elect seem to be furiously dedicated to avoiding education on even the most basic examples of economic theory, history, etc…
“Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts.”
Yes, because wanton government subsidies and tax distortions have completely twisted the markets for health care and college education. Is it any surprise that the markets where the government already intervenes the most are the ones where prices are growing unchecked? Return competition to health care and education, and costs will come into line.
Once again, the government ruins a couple industries, and then tells us that the government is the only solution to their problems…
“Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.”
Manufacturing employment as a share of the economy has been declining for at least half a century. One reason: we are more productive and need fewer manufacturing workers to produce the same amount of goods. The same thing happened in agriculture and no one laments that shift. Another reason our industrial base is under pressure is that taxes, lawsuits, overregulation, and high energy costs are driving some jobs offshore. We also do not have enough engineers and other technical specialists. Congress needs to fix the tax code and regulatory job killers here in America.
And let’s not forget unions in that mix…
It’s a shame we can’t dismiss Senator Webb as a lone ignoramus, instead of having to face the reality that he’s the mouthpiece of a party that hasn’t learned a thing about economics since Marx put pen to paper a couple hundred years ago, and still trades on getting votes with class warfare.
Their economic policies have already destroyed Europe. Do we really need to follow them down that road?
