I see where America's biggest corporations, the Fortune 500, have just reported record profits of $824 billion for 2011. This wasn't supposed to happen, not if you listened to the rhetoric from the chieftains of these firms, along with the paid shills of the Republican Party. After all, wasn't President Obama supposed to be a closet Marxist? And isn't he set on destroying free enterprise and turning us all into wards of the Democratic Party? Or was it a Muslim caliphate?
How did that argument go again? They said business needs tax cuts in order to hire more workers, and that America's seemingly high corporate tax rate was stifling business. They said that Wall Street had no confidence in Obama and that business would languish as a result. All those regulations and taxes had to be cut if we were ever to recover. If only Obama wasn't so extremist or anti-business. This is after Wall Street trashed the economy under Bush's indifferent watch, and before, during, and after the dramatic recovery of corporate profits and stock prices after Obama took office.
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch, the same Wall Street crowd that was, and under Obama, continues to be, the wealthiest and most privileged people this side of the House of Windsor.
Republican talking points have become a fantastical bundle of contradictions, increasingly disconnected to empirical reality. Here is ThinkProgress with more on how well big business has done under Obama and more background on increased productivity (with no commensurate wage increases), increasing CEO pay, and the 40-year low in the tax rates corporations actually pay.
No comments:
Post a Comment