As used by the Republican Party, the words “job creators” are jarring and hypocritical. The quality of life of millions of Americans has been deeply damaged by the implementation of policies driven by those words.
That was the entire premise behind the 2017 corporate tax cuts: More jobs. Did they create more jobs? They did not. And now the Republicans are pushing to extend those tax cuts again in 2025, using the same faulty premise.
No corporation hires people just to create jobs. They hire people to make products and provide services for which there is growing demand. That is a blatantly obvious fact. Demand drives economic growth. There is plenty of money available for corporations to meet any new demand for products in this nation.
In fact, corporations have so much money they buy back stock. The words “buying back stock” sound almost innocuous, but anytime stock is bought back, it is a statement of a shocking failure of American capitalism.
Think about it. When people buy stock in a company, they are risking everything — in the hope that the value of that stock will go up. If the price goes down or the company goes bankrupt, they lose everything. When people buy stock, the corporation does not owe its stockholders anything — no interest payments, no guaranties, no principal payments. Nothing — only the hope that the price will go up. When people use their money to buy stock in a company, it is absolutely free money to the corporation.
When they buy back stock, corporations are saying: “Our imagination and planning totally fails to come up with anything to invest in, so we are going to give you back the free money that you gave us!”
After the 2017 tax cut, corporations had so much money and so little imagination that they kept buying back stock and, in the year 2022, they bought back stock valued over $1,000,000,000,000. Yes, more than one trillion dollars. Instead of going to work to create jobs, that $1 trillion went back into the pockets of people who are definitely not “job creators.” And the really shocking result is that of that $1 trillion more than $400 billion went to overseas investors.
During a debate in 2016 in advance of the congressional election, state Sen. Steve Santarsiero acknowledged that the state had raised taxes, but pointed out that the money was used directly to fund highly visible state infrastructure projects that were desperately needed.
His opponent, Brian Fitzpatrick, made the hollow “job creator” claim that Republicans would lower taxes and that the lower taxes would drive so much economic activity that, even with the lower tax rates, the state would take in much more revenue due to the increased economic activity. Fitzpatrick was wrong in 2016, and he is still wrong today. The entire Republican Party is still wrong today.
Every report from every organization that tracks such things demonstrates/documents that the 2017 corporate tax cuts did not pay for themselves. In fact, the level of debt carried by the U.S. government increased by $7.8 trillion during Trump’s first administration.
At the same time, the huge gap in wealth between all hard-working Americans and the billionaires keeps increasing. The top 1% of Americans have total wealth of more than $38 trillion. That is more wealth than is owned by the entire middle class of Americans (60% of American families). And under Republican trickle-down, “Job Creator” economics, this gap keeps growing! It is hard to remember that just 30 years ago in 1995 the aggregate wealth of that same middle class was more than twice the wealth of the top 1%. We can develop a better taxation system and that effort has to start by acknowledging that trickle-down economics has never worked and never will.
