Showing posts with label recession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recession. Show all posts

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Tea Party Recession

I wish I could have been at Obama's speech today in Holland, Michigan. It's just 20 miles to the Sounth of me, but darnit, I had a raptor center I had to bring my kids to, and besides I didn't have a ticket. But It seems Obama's got the snare drum out and he's steadily laying down a beat about the Tea Party Recession. The Tea Party Recession...

...This isn't a man on the defense making talking points to shoot down criticisms of his leadership or economic stewardship.

This is a man going on the offense. He's chiseling his own talking points into the rock slab halls of the media juggernaut. No, no...he does not tell the marble what it will reveal. The marble tells him what it is...what must be revealed.

In this case, it's The Tea Party Recession. The current economic troubles aren't from some years long coke fueled banker manic gambling phase, like our last major crisis. And they're not from uncertainty in the middle east, or from wars, or from jobless figures.

No...the current economic troubles are entirely fabricated from whole cloth, tailored to drag America down until it can be dried and crumbled and smoked in a crack pipe to induce the euphoric illusion of some delusional, fanciful notion of an America that never existed, nor ever should exist.

And the Tea Party is so wonderfully and unabashedly proud of its willingness to drive America into oblivion so they can get their fix, that they are just too easy a target for this new type of framing....the Tea Party Recession. Because, after all, it was the very same Tea Party principles that lead us into the recession in the first place: lower taxes for millionaires and billionaires, deregulation, and a twisted obsession with focusing the entire national dialog on how they intend to change the US Constitution with amendments they want to add and amendments they want to scrap.

In an energetic speech to workers at a Holland, Michigan, hybrid car battery plant helped by government stimulus funds, Obama said the U.S. economy and American workers are capable of being the best in the world, but were being held back by political stalemate in Congress.
"There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics," Obama declared to applause.
Last week's first-ever downgrade of the U.S. credit rating by Standard & Poor's "could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress," the president said, adding: "It didn't happen because we didn't have the capacity to pay our bills. It happened because Washington doesn't have the capacity to come together and get things done."




Friday, June 24, 2011

Snyders Policies Already Costing Michigan Jobs

And the economic carnage from Michigan Governor Rick Snyder begins...A solar plant is relocating from Brighton, Michigan to Portage, Indiana. They're taking with them over 500 jobs. Great news for Indiana, bad news for Michigan...and a direct result of Snyder's new tax policies.

First this

"Let's stop the tax credits"

-- Rick Snyder


Then this...

[Indiana] plans to provide up to $4.2 million in tax credits based on the [solar] company's job creation plan. The Austria-based company plans to invest more than $26 million in the Portage plant, which officials said would help the company meet global demand for solar electronic inverters.


And so, this...

A solar technology company is moving its North American headquarters from Brighton to northwest Indiana.

The Indiana Economic Development Corp. said Thursday that Fronius USA will relocate to Portage, Ind., where it plans to lease 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space and create up to 512 jobs by 2016.


Bravo, Michigan conservatives.

Bravo.

So rarely can one make such a direct line from fiscal policy to job losses. But this is a pretty clear case.

Well done, Conservatives.

It seems our reps have convinced themselves that taxes and tax credits actually played a role in Michigan's economic woes over the past several decades...you know...instead of being singularly attached to a crumbling domestic automobile industry.

Granholm and the Dems...and...well...pretty much EVERYBODY in Michigan seems to understand we desperately need to diversify our economy. Our conservative leaders seem to actually think our problem was simultaneously Too High taxation and Too Low taxation (in the case of tax credits).

Here we go again.