Can we pay off the national debt? It is reprehensible that Congress voted to give a $1.6 trillion tax cut, and $1.5 trillion of it went to the richest 1% of Americans. When you are a homeowner and you have some extra cash you don’t spend it all on a trip to Fiji; you pay down the mortgage or sock away some money for the kids education. Instead they are taking money out of the poor people’s retirement fund, Social Security. Over 80% of the wear and tear on highways is done by the large heavy trucks; yet it’s the little car drivers who pay for it all. Ditto for how the American system facilitates the rich getting richer; compliments of the penny ante taxes of millions of hard working middle class Americans.
Recently the NASDAQ went from over 5000 to under 2000. Before this happened virtually every major stock brokerage firm, every business magazine, and every business evangelist on TV told investors to put at least 40% of their stocks in firms listed on the NASDAQ. Here in Austin – a hub of the high tech boom – most folks put more than that, trying to support the local businesses. We lost everything. Everybody but Michael Dell and the other senior executives at Dell and the other major firms. I wonder how many of them followed the advice of all the “experts”? They’ve made Martha Stewart’s case into an Inquisition just to warn the tens of thousands of other super rich folks who profited criminally from the tech boom and bust; to dive for cover – and stay there.
The benefits of federal grandiosity should NOT go to those multinational firms that have closed down U.S. facilities and moved any of their operations overseas during the latest recession. They have shown themselves to be unAmerican, and their charter to operate in the U.S. should be revoked. This would probably happen to all the large cap, Fortune 500 companies. Let them fend for themselves in the world market against the European activist community. Americans have always done best with small and mid- sized companies anyway.
The same goes for companies whose directors like Sam Walton at Wall Mart, Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Michael Dell at Dell Computers own such a huge share of the stock that whenever anybody purchases one of their products at least 25% of the price goes straight to the CEO or the Board of Directors. People who can do that with a clear conscience are no longer human beings. Fifty years ago they called that racketeering, profiteering, and put those thugs in jail for the rest of their days. Gates, Dell, et al deserve no less.
Otherwise, the Bush Administration will never create the 3.2 million jobs they want in 2004 if they continue blind support of big business. The large cap companies will just keep sending new jobs overseas where labor is cheaper; or continue to lobby for permanent resident status for the cheap immigrant workers. No, if Bush et al want to create jobs they have to support the small and mid cap companies. They better get going because right now the rate of new jobs being created doesn’t even keep up with the growth of the work force itself.