A VIEW from LICK SKILLET by Gerald Largen: Romney’s case shows rich not ‘job creators’

As you well know, gentle reader, the principal reason set forth by the defenders of giving the extremely wealthy a “free ride”, insofar as the rate of taxation imposed on their income, is the assertion that these are the “job creators.”

Now, this is a defence that they may or may not believe.

After all, some folks can make themselves believe just about anything, no matter how preposterous.

For instance, remember many years ago that there was a wide spread belief that man had not gone to the moon, and the pictures of the astronauts walking on the surface of that orb were just trick photography of actors walking in some desert in the Southwest?

And more recently the “Birthers” made themselves believe that President Obama was not born in the U.S.A., but in Kenya, or some other foreign clime.

Some, no doubt, still believe. (The most bizarre aspect of this story, whereby the President would be disqualified for not having been born in the U.S.A. is the unquestioned fact that the other candidate for president in the 2008 campaign, Sen. John McCain, for whom the “birthers” no doubt voted, was not born in the U.S.A. but was born in the Republic of Panama!)

Then there is the fanatical resistance to the notion of climate change. Any good, long-time gardener can tell you that the climate has been growing increasingly warmer, but the true-believer will have none of it.

And of course there is always that oldie, but goodie, “Evolution”. But, we won’t go into that right now.

But, to return to our point: The fact is that there is no validity whatsoever, to this theory, (and theory is all it is,) that by not taxing the rich, we are helping the employment situation, because they will take all this money that they would otherwise have paid in taxes and utilize it to create jobs for the unemployed.

Well, friends, we have never seen one bit of proof that this theory is valid, and we now confidently assert that instead its invalidity is being indisputably proven in the current Republican presidential campaign.

Gov. Romney has now agreed that his net worth is well over $200,000,000. He has released tax documents showing that in 24 months he received more than $40,000,000 in income on which he paid tax at the rate of 13.9 percent.

We do not know how much he took in preceding years, but it is unlikely that it was much, if any, less than the current $20,000,000 plus per year. As you know, the current maximum tax rate is 35 percent. So at 13.9 percent, Mr. Romney is keeping 21.1 percent that would otherwise have gone to pay his income tax, if he weren’t getting the benefit of the “rich man’s rate.”

If we have cyphered this correctly, and we are sure that there are readers who will promptly correct our calculations if they are erroneous, that means he has not paid, but retained approximately $4,220,000 per year for several past years.

It has become the fashion recently to put every financial figure in terms of ten years.

If we go along with that fashion, in the past ten years, Gov. Romney has most likely kept a total of approximately $42,200,000 which he would have paid in federal taxes, were he to have paid the “poor man’s” rate rather than the “rich man’s” rate.

With these forty-two millions of dollars, how many new jobs has he created? As far as we can tell, not a single one! We say this with some confidence inasmuch as he has trumpeted all the jobs that were created through the activities of the Bain Capital Company, so, it seems highly unlikely that he would have failed or refused to announce it, had he created any jobs, and would most likely have paraded the recipients of these new jobs before the TV cameras, and introduced them at the candidates debates, had they existed.

So, we are sure that they did not, and they do not, exist. He got the money, he kept the money, which he was entitled to do, but it is the height of hypocrisy to claim that high rollers, like himself, are entitled to special treatment and low tax rates because they use their wealth to create jobs.

They don’t.  It’s a made up story calculated to mislead the populace.

So, we trust that every time you hear or see one of these defenders of the rich not being taxed because they are the “job creators,” just try to imagine a picture in your mind of all these folks doing their jobs, lined up behind the said defender.

It shouldn’t be hard, since there aren’t any. It’s just another fabrication (a nice way of saying lie, don’t you think?) that these bought-and-paid-for congressmen are putting forth, in the belief that we will believe anything they tell us.

But, the history of their man Romney brands their statement as a falsehood, what the “fact checkers,” are now often referring to, when a whopper is told, as a “pants on fire” statement.
******
Of course, this trickery to befuddle the simple-minded is nothing new, its just the same old same old decked out in new clothes.

For a time it masqueraded as the “Trickle-Down Theory,” which postulated that even though we were giving the filthy rich special treatment so they wouldn’t have to pay their fair share of the tax burden, by doing so we were assuring that some at least of this great sea of cash would “Trickle Down” to those in a lower economic stratum.

It didn’t work that way, as people started to realize, but their high paid consultants and lobbyists then advised them to abandon “Trickle Down” and adopt instead the current deception of “They’re the Job Creators.”
Even earlier it had been the old chestnut that “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats.”

Well that was just as false as “Trickle Down” was, and “Job Creators” is.

Even in nature it’s false.

Some boats are swamped by a rising tide. Some are cast ashore and grounded by a rising tide, and yet others are thrown upon the shoals and rocky shores and broken apart by a rising tide.

It is the same with people.

Once some of the commentators and prognosticators have sense enough to figure it out, and tell the rest of the population that these people taking advantage of the “Free Ride” are not really job creators, and differ little from the Pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats who had convinced the King and his government to give them a free ride from the taxation that burdened the rest of the population, then they will abandon “Job Creators” as the basis for this discrimination in their favour, but rest assured, they’ll come up with another new slogan with which to mislead, and hornswoggle the population.

Wonder what it’ll be?