News Roundup for 9/2/11

Worker in a Republican Utopia

-Headline of the Day-
"Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say."

One thing you can count on with Republicans is that they're guaranteed to get supply and demand bass-ackwards and wrong, every time. Let me explain the modern conservative economic model for you and you'll see what I mean.

First, you give businesses tax cuts and gut regulations. If you do this, regardless of demand, businesses will hire people, because that's what business are for -- hiring people. It's a liberal myth that people start businesses to make money. They do it to become the lofty and selfless "job creator." Every time you've got a little extra money, you go out and hire another worker.

If demand is low, this means that businesses will hire people to do jobs that no one needs done. They'll lean on brooms or watch monkeys on YouTube or something for a while, because small businesses are charities and they're cool with that. After a while, everyone's drawing a paycheck for YouTube monkey viewing, they start spending that money, and -- voila! -- you've got demand. Now all these workers have something to do. No more YouTube monkeys and capitalism is saved!

Strangely enough, the world doesn't work anything like that at all. Businesses seem to believe they're in the business of making money, not jobs, and stubbornly refuse to hire workers when they don't need workers. You can cut taxes and strip regulations all you want, but if the demand for the goods or services isn't there, then they're not going to hire anybody. I think maybe because they're commies or something.

So McClatchy newspapers went out to verify the obvious. They contacted small business owners to get their take on taxes and regulations. "Their response was surprising," they report. "None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.".

There you have it, the American jobs crisis is the fault of small business owners -- because they refuse to put their heads in the clouds with Republicans, like decent Americans should. (McClatchy)


-Cartoon time with Mark Fiore-
Hey kids, Thursdays are usually cartoon day, but Uncle Mark was sick or one vacation or something and it was this whole big thing...

Anyway, Xeth is filling in and he's got a cartoon called:


Click for animation

And rocket packs. We were supposed to have rocket packs. The Jetsons was just a horrible lie. (MarkFiore.com)


-Bonus HotD-
"Palin to Rip 'Crony Capitalism' in Iowa Speech."

Wait, what? (RealClearPolitics)