Open Letter to John Carney On the Occasion of Your “Town Hall” Conference Call
Dear Congressman,
I listened to your conference call “town hall meeting” and I was amazed by how many times you mentioned the magical effects that a payroll tax cuts could have on our economy.
As a small business person, I’d like to disabuse you of this notion that payroll tax cuts stimulate hiring.
Unlike you and every member of Congress who is in love with this idea that payroll tax cuts are the most awesome thing in the world, I am someone who pays payroll taxes, and I can assure you that payroll tax cuts are practically invisible to both the employee and the small business employer. The only thing that will stimulate hiring is increased demand. No sane business person is going to hire new employees absent increasing demand for their product or service. I want to like you, but you have been brainwashed and are spouting nonsense. Please stop it.
Consider this, if tax cuts are the job creating machine that you make them out to be, where are all the jobs? Since George W. Bush’s first term we’ve been feed a steady diet of magical tax cuts and look at the employment paradise that the tax cuts have created.
Stick to talking about infrastructure. You mentioned that in passing. But you mentioned infrastructure spending once for every five times you mentioned payroll tax cuts last night.
Flip that ratio around if you want to continue enjoying the support of Delaware’s small business community.
Sincerely,
Jason330
PS. The “Town Hall” Conference Call format is a travesty. Just saying.
And start speaking like a real Democrat instead of a Robo-Carper with garbled wiring.
Congressman Carney will get back to you, just as soon as he looks up “travesty.”
I jest. but Carney is really not at fault here. He is simply following the White House line like a good soldier.
Last December in his Pearl Harbor Day speech trying to justify his extension of the Bush tax cuts, President Obama for the first time introduced the phrase “tax reform.” That set off alarm bells for me, but apparently not for other liberals around here. Up until that day, Democrats had a perfectly good tax reform plan – let the Bush tax cuts expire. But apparently Obama had other plans. And weak Congresscritters like Carney, Coons, and Carper didn’t challenge Obama. They were happy and relieved that Obama was not going to call on them to support tax increases of any kind.
Now it is clear that when Obama says “tax reform” he means Bowles-Simpson, with its top marginal rate of 29%, its reliance on unicorns to lower rates while creating more revenue, and its destruction of preferential tax treatment of long-term investments. And Carney/Coons/Carper are falling right in line. Whatever you say about Carney on tax policy also applies to Coons and Carper.
The Dem base didn’t help either. We had and still have Democratic activists who think it is important to “get things done” no matter what. But when you have lost the House and the only things you can get done are Republican things, I think you need to stop “getting things done” for a while.
Sure I’d rather our delegation understand all this instinctively as Democrats and act on it. But they don’t have that much character or individuality. So we need to help them. I’m not sure we have the will.
I scoff at your thesis that Dems like Carney are somehow compelled to follow the President on payroll tax cuts.
1. Obama is pushing the payroll tax cuts as a job-creating mechanism.
2. Dems in Congress don’t want to be caught voting “against jobs.”
Do you see how Obama is screwing us by setting up the false premise of #1?
And now Obama can apply additional pressure by the fact that he cannot politically afford a legislative defeat.
Sometimes it is better NOT to “get something done.”
Puck, you make good points.
There is a wide gulf… a chasm… a galaxy wide abyss… between voting for a jobs bill that contains some thing you are not crazy about, and spending two thirds of a conference call pushing magical unicorn piss.
Also, if Carney’s love of payroll tax cuts is predicated on his dedication to the Jobs Bill, why didn’t he fucking mention the jobs bill?
Q.E.D.
In your face.
Delaware with just 3 in Congress breeds DINOS and RINOS. Carney has the same problem Castle had. If our one single Representative takes the job seriously, that means trying to Represent all the people of Delaware the best way possible. Not just liberals, not just conservatives, but that mushy in between where nobody feels totally left out. Trouble is, if somebody like Urquhart got elected, that kind of inclusiveness would go out the window. Stick with the mushy middle, the alternative is way worse. Now if Carney starts voting against Democrats with Republicans, out he goes.
“Now if Carney starts voting against Democrats with Republicans, out he goes.”
The problem is the Democratic legislation is getting Republicanized before it even comes to a vote (a Carper specialty). Obama himself is introducing Republican ideas as his opening offer. Democrats need to challenge the President to make bills more Democratic.
Some Democratic bills, like the debt limit, attract No votes from the right and the left. I would have liked to have seen more Democrats join with teabaggers to defeat the debt limit bill and force it to a bill that includes revenue.
There is even a real chance Senate Democrats from oil states will filibuster the jobs bill over taxes on oil companies. But that won’t happen, because those tax increases will be yanked, because Obama and Reid won’t stand up to them.
Its a great letter Jason.
The question I have for you is, What, if anything, can gov’t do to create demand?
Example: There seems to be a problem with access to capitol with the banking reform that took place back during the meltdown. Perhaps it needs to be revisited? It could help the housing industry. Right now, the only people buying houses are a very specific group of wealthy individuals and pensioners.
Why Carney said what he did is of little intrest to me. Getting to the core of the problem (demand) does. Carney has always been a centrist not a flaming liberal, or uber conservative. So its not surprising to me that he once again took the middle road using popular phrases of the day.
Any job creation plan that starts with “freeing up capital for business” is full of shit from the outset.
Business is awash in capital, and banks are floating on an ocean of cheap money to lend. If they won’t lend it to smaller businesses, it is because it isn’t likely to be paid back until demand returns.
Even if we were somehow to shower free money onto consumers, that money will just run out the tax-cuts-for-the-rich hole we left in the bucket, and be pumped upward to the top 1% while creating relatively few jobs. Which is what happened to ARRA.
But yet we do need to shower consumers with money, in the form of WPA-style direct job creation, and also with more infrastucture projects. But before we start pouring in money, first we have to plug the hole in the bucket by finally letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
And the only thing that will help housing is jobs. Nothing else. Except maybe rewriting mortgages.