What the 'McCutcheon' decision has to do with today's jobs report
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Robert Reich Guest blogger
What does the Supreme Court鈥檚 鈥淢cCutcheon鈥� decision this week have to do with today鈥檚 jobs report, showing 192,000 new jobs for March?
Connect the dots. More than five years after Wall Street鈥檚 near meltdown the number of full-time workers聽is still less than it was in December 2007, yet the working-age population of the U.S. has increased by 13 million since then.
This explains why so many people are still getting nowhere. Unemployment among those 18 to 29 is 11.4 percent, nearly double the national rate.
Most companies continue to shed workers, cut wages, and horde their cash because they don鈥檛 have enough customers to warrant expansion. Why? The vast middle class and poor don鈥檛 have enough purchasing power, as 95 percent of the economy鈥檚 gains go to the top 1 percent.
That鈥檚 why we need to (1) cut taxes on average people (say, exempting the first $15,000 of income from Social Security taxes and making up the shortfall by taking the cap off income subject to it), (2) raise the minimum wage, (3) create jobs by repairing roads, bridges, ports, and much of the rest of our crumbling infrastructure, (4) add teachers and teacher鈥檚 aides to now over-crowded classrooms, and (5) create 鈥済reen鈥� jobs and a new WPA for the long-term unemployed.
And pay for much of this by raising taxes on the top, closing tax loopholes for the rich, and ending corporate welfare.
But none of this can be done because some wealthy people and big corporations have a strangle-hold on our politics. 鈥淢cCutcheon鈥� makes that strangle-hold even tighter.
Connect the dots and you see how the big-money takeover of our democracy has lead to an economy that鈥檚 barely functioning for most Americans.
