Obama's better bargain and our perverse politics

[Enrique]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/175540/obamas-better-bargain-and-our-perverse-politics#ixzz2aj6H3gb7

(...)

But is this what the country has come to? Consider the context, and it’s stunning.

Unemployment is still at crisis levels, and is recovering more slowly than during any previous recession. In fact, throughout the recovery more unemployed workers have been leaving the labor force than have found work. Eighty percent of US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least part of their lives and half of the US population is currently considered poor or low-income.

Meanwhile, corporate profits are sky-rocketing to all-time highs, and the Wall Street stock indices are booming at pre-crash levels. The corporate tax burden, meanwhile, is already at historic lows, and the United States collects less corporate taxes as a share of GDP than all but one other OECD country. Corporate America has so much cash it can just stash over a trillion dollars overseas and just park it there until given a chance to bring it back.

Inequality—the gap between the have and have-nots—is widening to historic and alarming levels (the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80 percent hold 7 percent of it). It’s actually accelerated faster during the economic recovery and Obama’s presidency, as corporate profits bounded back and most of the regained jobs have been at the lowest wage rung.

In this context, Obama’s proposal is, in a word, insane. Through the repatriation levy, he’s essentially resorted to bribing an already-engorged corporate sector and its shareholders with even more money (savings from not taxing massive overseas income), in exchange for taking a fraction of that gift and steering it towards some job creation efforts.

Read more: Obama's Better Bargain and Our Perverse Politics | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/175540/obamas-better-bargain-and-our-perverse-politics#ixzz2aj6H3gb7
Follow us: @thenation on Twitter | TheNationMagazine on Facebook