Day 638 Tuesday October 16, 2018 943 Days to Go
We returned this morning from a debate between the two people running for Congress in our district, the Virginia 7th. It’s an hour and a half to that end of the district, which says a lot about gerrymandering. This district is famous for the Tea Party shouting down Eric Canter and then having Canter lose to an upstart named Dave Brat. Brat went on to team up with John Jordan as part of the Freedom Caucus, which opposed everything and got John Boehner to give up on being Speaker of the House. This ushered in Whiz-kid, Paul Ryan, who you may remember introduced a budget that had no numbers in it other than page numbers and was filled with wishful thinking and Republican platitudes. Obama went to visit the Republicans in Baltimore opened up this budget to a random page and read what it said. He stopped and said, “You can’t govern based on this.”
After the Tea Party folks shouted down Canter they got back on their fancy bus motor coaches and left the district. Who exactly paid for those buses I have never found out. I also don’t know if those “protestors” got paid, but suffice it to say Dave Brat has always been worried about “paid protestors” and protestors in general. That is why he doesn’t publish his schedule. It also why he’s never held a town hall. Oh, he’s had events he called town halls, but to me a town hall is where voters get to ask their representatives questions. He’s never done that.
I should know I’ve been to everyone of them. All two. In both you got to write questions on 3”x5” cards and a moderator got to read what they wanted. He also did this via his highly unpublished facebook town halls. By not taking questions directly from the audience he can’t be challenged on his outright lies.
Things like pre-existing conditions which he says somehow he’s for. If by that he means he’s for giving you a pittance and you can fend for yourself then okay he’s for pre-existing conditions, like most people are for getting unnecessary root canals, but otherwise it’s not true. It’s a lie.
The most repeated line in the debate was Brat mentioning Nancy Pelosi. If her name had been the key to a drinking game you would have been under the table after 15 minutes. It got to be so silly that the crowd started to finish the line like a greek chorus. Someone put out a Brat bingo card and it had Pelosi in every square. Olde Dave kept repeating the phrase “the failed policies of Nancy Pelosi.” He also kept touting how the economy had been in desperate straights until 2016 when from Day 1 they had turned the whole situation around. This is a pretty stunning statement when you compare it to the a chart of GDP growth for the U.S. economy. W handed Obama an economy in the dumper. It was under his leadership and the work of Nancy Pelosi in the House that turned the economy around and it’s been uphill ever since.
Nancy Pelosi was recently reviewed in Time magazine and was called the most effective House leader in modern times. Why? Because every piece of major legislation she introduced passed. Compare that to John Boehner and Paul Rayan. The only thing that got passed under them was a huge tax break for the super rich (and a few pennies for everyone else.)
Spanberger pointed out that Brat and the Republicans passed a tax bill that added $1,900,000,000,000.00 to the national debt. Brat said it revived the economy and gave money to working people. This was an interesting slight of hand on his part. He said that the money went to capital appreciation and then to the workers. How adding more money to the coffers of a company, and that is what the capital appreciation account is, does not translate to workers getting any money. Brat pointed out that one company gave all their workers a $3,000.00 one time bonus. Wow. Nice.
The number of companies that gave bonuses was fifty, 50, five zero.
The number of businesses in the U.S. is eleven million; 11,000,000; one one zero zero zero zero zero zero.
And it’s a one time shot, not like the businesses that got a permanent tax cut.
Imagine if instead Congress had increased the minimum wage?
Let’s do a little fun with math.
Let’s compare the great things Dave Brat and the Republicans did
versus
The poor pathetic failing liberal policies of Nancy Pelosi
Let’s compare what Brat said the Republicans did for workers versus what some socialist far left leaning Democrats propose. Or to put it another way: What the hard right Freedom Caucus Republicans did versus what the moderate centrist Democrats proposed, which was to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.
Here is a list of the companies in the S&P 500 that announced they were going to do something to help their workers based on the Tax Cuts the Republicans put through:
I count 50 companies. Let’s assume that they all give their workers $3,000 as Dave suggested one company did.
Let’s assume that the average number of employees in an S&P company is 2500. It’s not. Actually, it’s 24 full and part time, but let’s go with 2500.
ref: https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/%5EGSPC–Number-of-Employees
If the 50 companies gave $3,000 to 2,500 employees each that would be:
50 x 2500 x $3000 = $375,000,000
Wow. Three hundred and seventy five million! That’s nothing to sneeze at. Am I right?
Okay, let’s look at the Dem’s idea of raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.
The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
Let’s assume every worker in America is making the minimum wage. A few make more, I know.
So the Dem’s would give everyone an extra $7.75 an hour ($15.00 – $7.25 = $7.75).
How many people are working in the U.S.A.?
154,340,000
How long do they work on average per week?
34.4 hours
So let’s do the math:
$7.75 x 154,340,000 = $1,188,385,000 per hour
times 34.4 hr/wk = $5,274,896,000 per week
times 50 weeks = $263,744,800,000 per year
That’s
three hundred and seventy five million versus
two hundred and sixty three billion seven hundred and forty four million eight hundred thousand.
Hum, which proposal would do more to help the economy?
How would those poor corporations be able to pay for all those increased wages?
And what about all the people thrown out of work because the struggling companies “would have to let a few people go”?
(Remember the CEO of Wal Mart, who talked about the “family” you are in when you work for Wal Mart? Yeah, when asked what would happen if they had to pay everyone an extra buck he said the company would go under? Remember kindly old Sam Walton? He was forced by the government to pay overtime, which he did, but not before telling anyone who cashed that overtime check would be fired? Nice family values.)
How in the world are they going to pay that enormous $263 Billion?
Well, Dave Brat told us how. The Capital Appreciation Account of those companies. In other words, the cash on hand. How much cash do U.S. companies have? According to the Wall Street Journal last year they had $2.4 Trillion sitting around. That’s before the “repatriation” of money from overseas.
That’s $2,400,000,000.00.
How many times does $263 Billion go into $2.4 Trillion? Answer 9.12. That’s over nine years worth of cash on hand.
But then there’s the repatriated money. The money stashed overseas to avoid paying taxes. (If we did that kind of thing we’d be in jail, but hey that’s a different story.)
Money overseas is $3.4 Trillion. Why that’s another 12.927 years. Lemme throw that in with the 9.12 and we have 22 years worth of cash to pay the extra minimum wage salaries of $15.00 per hour.
Most of the Tax Cut that the Republicans passed went to the very rich and the very very rich. Do you think they are spending more money? Maybe a little, but it’s a poor place to invest if you want to rev up an economy.
If you put money in hands of people who are starving they will spend it immediately to get food. That in turn creates demand for more food and for people to grow more food, stock grocery shelves, deliver the food, etc. Money invested in the right places in an economy can have a “multiplier effect” on an economy. In other words, a dollar given to a person on welfare that needs more food can translate to maybe five dollars in down stream benefits for the economy. Naturally, this would increase tax revenues too.
You would think a guy like Dave Brat, who claims to be an economist, would understand this, but when I’ve heard him talk (mainly via man-‘splainig the economy) he doesn’t seem to understand, or care about this point. It’s not a really fine esoteric economic point. It’s basic.
So you have a choice. Let the Republicans cut taxes on people with money who aren’t paying their fair share, give companies a way to bring money back into the U.S. that they didn’t pay taxes on (and will pay a little) and then give a pittance to a few workers or give everyone a raise and increase the economy across the board.
943 Days to Go
PS Some of as Dave Brat would call them “The unruly mob of left wing political agitators” waiting to get their hands on him and tear him apart.