One of the GOP's pet ideas for economic stimulus is to offer individuals tax incentives (i.e., credits) for spending money. Such tax incentives won't work, and here's why: you have to have money to spend before you can spend any money.
If people are out of work, I don't care what kind of tax incentives are out there--people are not going to be buying new cars, newly-constructed houses, or much of anything else beyond the bare minimums they need for food, clothing, and shelter. No tax incentive in the world is going to encourage you to spend when you don't earn enough money even to pay taxes, let alone need to get your taxes reduced.
An astute reader's letter to the editor published in last night's Omaha World-Herald revealed the reason for the flaw in the GOP's collective thinking [and I use the term "thinking" loosely--Ed.]: the GOP doesn't recognize that workers and consumers are the same people. They want to reduce not just workers' benefits, but the number of workers at the same time they want consumers to spend more. Let's face it: that's impossible when workers and consumers are one and the same.
But the GOP doesn't get it, for the GOP's concept of "workers" is "beings beneath our notice and subject to our contempt." They honestly think that every penny given to workers is a penny taken from the pockets of their "consumers," who seem to be limited to being the owners, operators, or anyone else in business who makes an annual income of at least six figures.
The tax incentives the GOP pushes are not for people like you and me. They are for the acceptably well-off. The rest of us can go hang as far as the GOP is concerned.
And lest you doubt me, remember: during last summer's presidential campaigning, John McCain himself said he thought middle class people were making $500,000 a year.
The reason this blindness didn't stir outrage amongst those who are relatively poor but who support the GOP nonetheless is that the GOP has convinced them that it is the protector of proper social values, like being anti-reproductive choice, anti-gay rights, anti-immigration (illegal or not), and so on.
The GOP is becoming increasingly marginalized yet its leaders think it needs to move even farther to the right. As far as I am concerned, let it. It's driving itself over a cliff and doesn't even realize it. But President Obama's rightful desire to move Washington away from partisanship may actually be giving the rightest of the right wing a lifeline . . . when what it really needs is a Do Not Resuscitate order.
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