Robert Reich: why the "jobs summit" is a bad joke

[Enrique]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/07/14/reich_foreign_consumers

(...)

Today (Wednesday), leaders of big business are meeting with the president and vice president (along with former President Bill Clinton) to urge that the White House push stalled trade-opening agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. They’re calling it a “Jobs for America Summit” and holding it at the offices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

The irony is that many of America’s surging imports are coming from these same American-based companies. They’re either employing foreign workers to make things for sale in the U.S., contracting with foreign companies to do so, or contracting for parts and supplies. Jobs for America Summit? These executives don’t care about American jobs. They care about their own bottom lines. That’s what they’re paid to care about.

But their bottom lines have little or nothing to do with good jobs for Americans. They have to do with good returns for American investors.

(...)

The way to get jobs back is to increase federal spending in the short term in order to make up for the gap left by consumers and businesses (the fastest way to get this money into circulation is by extending unemployment benefits and aiding stranded state and local governments).

Over the longer term, we can lift the wages of the vast majority of Americans by expanding and
extending the Earned Income Tax Credit -- an income supplement -- up through the middle class, and pay for it by a higher marginal income tax rate on the top. And while we’re at it, exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and pay for that by lifting the cap on Social Security taxes on all incomes in excess of $250,000.

Beyond that, and over the still longer term, America’s vast middle class and the poor need to be more productive and innovative, so they can add more value to an increasingly integrated global economy. That means better education. Instead of firing schoolteachers, closing libraries, and increasing tuitions at public universities, we have to do exactly the opposite.

[msongs]

1. government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations nt

[WinkyDink]

2. Succinct and spot-on. ESP. the paragraph on taxes.

[burnsei sensei]

3. How is begging in the streets for pennies

any different from begging in the streets for jobs?
The people, the workers, are humiliated again.
It is certainly not for them that the "jobs summit" is being held.

[Greyhound]

4. More proof that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. n/t

[lib2DaBone]

5. Seems to me they are going 100mph... in the wrong direction.

Let's see.. Free Trade resulted in Off-shoring that bankrupted our country... so, oh ya... by all means... let's have some more "Free Trade".