Republican Bag Of Ideas Is Empty

In the last year-and-a-half of his presidency, Bush oversaw the loss of a couple of million American jobs. This month, another 200,000 jobs were lost, and most economists believe the next few months could be just as bad (if not worse). Our nation is quickly sliding from a recession into another depression like that experienced in the 1930's.

Our new president has come up with a stimulus package that would "provide income support to the poor and recently unemployed, distribute aid to state governments, seek relatively quick employment gains through public works spending and aim to spark consumer and business spending through targeted tax cuts." The plan is huge and most of the money would be borrowed, but most economists believe if it is implemented quickly it could be a big boost to the economy.

President Obama has reached out to Republicans to try and get their ideas to see if the plan could be improved. That was a useless gesture. The Republicans are completely out of ideas and have decided their only course of action is to try and obstruct the plan offered by Obama and the Democrats. The only thing the Republicans can come up with is to give their rich buddies some more tax breaks.

Of course, the last time they did that, it just resulted in huge deficits and did nothing for the economy. The truth is that Obama's plan includes some tax cuts, but it is for the working and middle classes. These cuts make sense, because this is money that will have to be spent, helping to spur the economy.

But those aren't the cuts the Republicans want. They want tax cuts for the rich, claiming it will result in job creation. Nonsense! Even in good times, a tax cut for the rich results in only 30% of it being invested in ways that would create jobs. In these uncertain times, it would do nothing. It would simply be hoarded and cause the deficit to be even larger than necessary.

It's bad enough that we must create a huge deficit to stimulate the economy. But if we must do it, the money should go to help those who need it -- and that's not those who are rich. They can take care of themselves. Those without jobs, those losing their homes and those having trouble feeding their families are the ones who need help.

But the Republicans are out of ideas. Most of their old ideas of deregulation, help the rich and letting the corporations write our laws, are what has put us in this mess in the first place. Those ideas have created the biggest gap between the rich and the rest of America in over a hundred years and destroyed our economy.

Their idea of giving all the money to the rich and waiting for it to trickle down to the rest of us, has been shown to be a joke. The times this country is most prosperous is when the common man has money, because then it will be spent and the economy stimulated. Money does not trickle down in a capitalist economy -- it flows upward.

The fact is that the bag of Republican ideas is empty, and has been since the neocons took control of the party.