Government Did Not Build Your Business

[Bfgrn]

People on the right have never really understood how markets work.

The goal of any business is to increase market share.

Shareholders want market share.

Boards of Directors fire CEO's who do not build market share.

A monopoly is the point of building market share.

Steve Jobs doesn't want competition. He wants every tablet user to own an iPad.

The largest corporations have enough capital to fund elections and staff government. They have enough money to capture whole regulatory bodies.

In short, large corporations buy government and media assets in order to create the legal, regulatory and discursive environment for building and sustaining monopolies. Eli Lilly, by pumping money into congress, was able to shut down competition from generic and foreign competitors. Big oil did the same with energy. They successfully defended their control over energy from a host of different challenges. Capitalists don't want competition. Their shareholders win biggest when they capture the largest possible block of consumers. The point of business is to achieve a monopoly so that you can raise prices without fear of having your customers stolen.

Reagan, for instance, was funded massively by big oil. Remember: Carter posed a threat to big oil. Cater desperately wanted energy competition. Carter predicted that our reliance on high petroleum use would lead to crippling gas costs. He wanted alternative energy and conservation to compete with big oil - to pose solutions which eroded the market share of big oil and forced them to lower prices to retain customers. Reagan successfully defeated the challenges posed to big oil. He used government to solidify the monopoly power of big oil and he tied consumers to energy costs that would some day destroy the economy. This is what happens when special interests capture politicians and rig markets. Reagan helped rig the market in favor if his donors. The Left does the exact same thing.

Republican voters who talk about free markets don't get it. None of the corporations who exist inside markets want a free market - they want market share; they want monopolies - they don't want competition to destroy their profits. Competition erodes market share. Corporations use their profits to buy regulators and politicians in order to rig markets and get more market share. This allows them to raise prices without losing consumers to a competitor. Once you understand this, you will understand what has happened to U.S. capitalism since Reagan. We now have a bunch of special interests running the economy.

The big problem is that we have no means to fix this problem. Sean Hannity is paid by the same special interests who run the economy to defend these monopolies as "freedom". Sean will never tell his voters that companies like Eli Lilly and Exxon can raise their prices because Washington has helped them destroy the competition. If you try to break the monopolies and restore competition, Glen Beck screams "socialism".

God help us.

Your usual excellent post Londoner.

Here is a liberal who not only understands how the market works, but he also understands the ethical and moral imperatives that must be part of the rules and regulations required to make the market a benefit to everyone, not just the few. The best example of the dangers of regulatory capture are polluters, who pose a physical danger to human life, human health and our precious life sustaining resources.

What his uncle, our President, said 49 years ago was directed at the Soviet Union, but sadly, it can now be applied to the left and the right in America:

"So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

I strongly recommend reading the whole speech.

2005

I want to say this: There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.

The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.

What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. That's what we do with the Riverkeepers -- we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full-time, paid Riverkeeper -- each one agrees to sue polluters.

At Riverkeeper, we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists anymore. We're free marketers. We go out into the marketplace, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We're going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits, because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country. What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient, and the kind of corporate-crony capitalism which has been embraced by this White House, which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity, and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria. [applause]

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.

And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.

This White House (Bush) has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.

In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined; they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction.

The only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy. You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny, where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but, over the long term, the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number-one issue for all of us: to try to restore American democracy, because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.

 

[Bfgrn]

People on the right have never really understood how markets work.

The goal of any business is to increase market share.

Shareholders want market share.

Boards of Directors fire CEO's who do not build market share.

A monopoly is the point of building market share.

Steve Jobs doesn't want competition. He wants every tablet user to own an iPad.

The largest corporations have enough capital to fund elections and staff government. They have enough money to capture whole regulatory bodies.

In short, large corporations buy government and media assets in order to create the legal, regulatory and discursive environment for building and sustaining monopolies. Eli Lilly, by pumping money into congress, was able to shut down competition from generic and foreign competitors. Big oil did the same with energy. They successfully defended their control over energy from a host of different challenges. Capitalists don't want competition. Their shareholders win biggest when they capture the largest possible block of consumers. The point of business is to achieve a monopoly so that you can raise prices without fear of having your customers stolen.

Reagan, for instance, was funded massively by big oil. Remember: Carter posed a threat to big oil. Cater desperately wanted energy competition. Carter predicted that our reliance on high petroleum use would lead to crippling gas costs. He wanted alternative energy and conservation to compete with big oil - to pose solutions which eroded the market share of big oil and forced them to lower prices to retain customers. Reagan successfully defeated the challenges posed to big oil. He used government to solidify the monopoly power of big oil and he tied consumers to energy costs that would some day destroy the economy. This is what happens when special interests capture politicians and rig markets. Reagan helped rig the market in favor if his donors. The Left does the exact same thing.

Republican voters who talk about free markets don't get it. None of the corporations who exist inside markets want a free market - they want market share; they want monopolies - they don't want competition to destroy their profits. Competition erodes market share. Corporations use their profits to buy regulators and politicians in order to rig markets and get more market share. This allows them to raise prices without losing consumers to a competitor. Once you understand this, you will understand what has happened to U.S. capitalism since Reagan. We now have a bunch of special interests running the economy.

The big problem is that we have no means to fix this problem. Sean Hannity is paid by the same special interests who run the economy to defend these monopolies as "freedom". Sean will never tell his voters that companies like Eli Lilly and Exxon can raise their prices because Washington has helped them destroy the competition. If you try to break the monopolies and restore competition, Glen Beck screams "socialism".

God help us.

I was going to reply to you intelligently, then I read your post.

You should post this in the appropriate forum.

Conspiracy forum...really?

The modern corporation is the dominant form of business organization in the world today. Corporations' reach, however, is not limited to the business world. As they have multiplied in number, size, and power, corporations have also begun to exert extraordinary influence over the civic, economic, and cultural life of the human societies which host them. Although corporations are effective mechanisms for generating certain kinds of wealth, much of their influence can rightly be regarded as pernicious and even dangerous.

There are two linked problems with such concentrations of cor*porate power. First, that power increases corporations' ability to influence societal affairs, from fixing prices to altering laws. Second, while corporations and governments may have similar amounts of power, the latter are designed-at least nominally-to serve the public interest, and many are accountable to these publics. Because of shareholder pressures and other demands, most corporations today focus almost entirely on maximizing profits for their shareholders-and they do so primarily by externalizing as many of their social and environmental costs as possible.

In his book Tyranny of the Bottom Line, Ralph Estes examined the extent of this cost externalization in the case of U.S. corporations. Factoring in workplace injuries, medical care required by the failure of unsafe products, health costs from pollution, and many others, Estes found that external costs to U.S. taxpayers totaled $3.5 trillion in 1995 - four times higher than the profits of U.S. corporations that year ($822 billion). This sort of externalization toll is routinely evident in hazy skies, injured consumers, and impoverished workers in the United States and elsewhere.

According to a 2004 report released by U.S. Representative George Miller, one 200-employee Wal-Mart store may cost federal taxpayers $420,000 per year because of the need for federal aid (such as housing assistance, tax credits, and health insurance assistance) for Wal-Mart's low-wage employees. Moreover, many corporations fill their labor needs offshore in order to exploit unorganized workers in low-cost and politically friendly countries. Over 40 million people now work in export-processing or "free trade" zones. These areas, often exempt from national legislation, allow manufacturers to demand long hours, pay lower wages, and ignore health and safety regulations.

Corporations have achieved considerable freedom to act in ways that harm the host on which they depend. They have done so primarily by means of regulatory capture, the redesign of societal laws by vested interests for their preferential benefit. This is not new; corporations have always sought to influence lawmakers. TNCs' current levels of power, money, and freedom are unprecedented, however, and regulatory capture has become widespread. The results can be seen in the scores of laws and court rulings that now protect corporations' right to profit, right to pollute, right to patent intellectual property-at the expense of citizens, farmers, workers, consumers, communities, and indigenous peoples. As U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes once remarked, "This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations." That was in 1884; it's truer now than ever.

Parasite hosts are generally helpless to alter the destructive behavior of the parasites that have invaded their systems-a limitation that is often fatal. Humans, in contrast, can regain control and shape the role of the corporation to benefit the host rather than destroy it.
more

 

[Truthseeker420]

Who ever said Government built your business?

That is stupid?

“If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” declared President Barack Obama at a campaign stop last week in Virginia. Evidently, the president believes that economic growth and job creation are largely the result of actions taken by benevolent government agencies. But while it is certainly the case that good governance is essential, entrepreneurs engaging in voluntary cooperation coordinated through competition in free markets is what actually creates wealth and jobs.

*************************

I could not agree 100% more (with RightWinger).

You are taking that out of context, which Republicans do a lot of..

 

[editec]

“If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen”

Barack Hussein Obama

IF Obama said that it was a rather silly thing to say.

That is really only true for some businesses whose primary customer is (or was) the US government.

Most small businesses don't have the US government as their primary or at least one of their major customers.

 

[zeke]

People on the right have never really understood how markets work.

The goal of any business is to increase market share.

Shareholders want market share.

Boards of Directors fire CEO's who do not build market share.

A monopoly is the point of building market share.

Steve Jobs doesn't want competition. He wants every tablet user to own an iPad.

The largest corporations have enough capital to fund elections and staff government. They have enough money to capture whole regulatory bodies.

In short, large corporations buy government and media assets in order to create the legal, regulatory and discursive environment for building and sustaining monopolies. Eli Lilly, by pumping money into congress, was able to shut down competition from generic and foreign competitors. Big oil did the same with energy. They successfully defended their control over energy from a host of different challenges. Capitalists don't want competition. Their shareholders win biggest when they capture the largest possible block of consumers. The point of business is to achieve a monopoly so that you can raise prices without fear of having your customers stolen.

Reagan, for instance, was funded massively by big oil. Remember: Carter posed a threat to big oil. Cater desperately wanted energy competition. Carter predicted that our reliance on high petroleum use would lead to crippling gas costs. He wanted alternative energy and conservation to compete with big oil - to pose solutions which eroded the market share of big oil and forced them to lower prices to retain customers. Reagan successfully defeated the challenges posed to big oil. He used government to solidify the monopoly power of big oil and he tied consumers to energy costs that would some day destroy the economy. This is what happens when special interests capture politicians and rig markets. Reagan helped rig the market in favor if his donors. The Left does the exact same thing.

Republican voters who talk about free markets don't get it. None of the corporations who exist inside markets want a free market - they want market share; they want monopolies - they don't want competition to destroy their profits. Competition erodes market share. Corporations use their profits to buy regulators and politicians in order to rig markets and get more market share. This allows them to raise prices without losing consumers to a competitor. Once you understand this, you will understand what has happened to U.S. capitalism since Reagan. We now have a bunch of special interests running the economy.

The big problem is that we have no means to fix this problem. Sean Hannity is paid by the same special interests who run the economy to defend these monopolies as "freedom". Sean will never tell his voters that companies like Eli Lilly and Exxon can raise their prices because Washington has helped them destroy the competition. If you try to break the monopolies and restore competition, Glen Beck screams "socialism".

God help us.

I was going to reply to you intelligently, then I read your post.
You should post this in the appropriate forum.

Going to reply "intelligently"? I seriously doubt that possible. LMAO. But go for it.

 

[OODA_Loop]

Your confusion is not cause by me, it is caused by trying to take a quote way out of context. Republicans are trying to say that your business operates without any help from private or government and that is absurd.

Business = Chicken

Government = Egg

 

[rightwinger]

“If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen”

Barack Hussein Obama

IF Obama said that it was a rather silly thing to say.

That is really only true for some businesses whose primary customer is (or was) the US government.

Most small businesses don't have the US government as their primary or at least one of their major customers.

Obama was talking about roads and bridges. Conservatives love to take things out of context and their loyal minions don't know the difference

 

[Steelplate]

Your confusion is not cause by me, it is caused by trying to take a quote way out of context. Republicans are trying to say that your business operates without any help from private or government and that is absurd.

Business = Chicken

Government = Egg

really? tell that to Boeing and all the other military suppliers...tell that to private road construction businesses, tell that to private IT firms who take government contracts...how about the subsidized? Oil, Big Agra, big Pharma? just to name a few...

No one is saying that businessmen don't work hard and build their businesses. What is being said is that having a logistical system already in place for businesses to use, having police and fire protection, having teachers that helped instill that drive within to do great things are things that government hhas done to help make the businessman's job easier.

 

[OODA_Loop]

What is being said is that having a logistical system already in place for businesses to use, having police and fire protection, having teachers that helped instill that drive within to do great things are things that government hhas done to help make the businessman's job easier.

Government didn't build that.

The moment business stops filling those coffers........government starts cutting those services.

 

[rightwinger]

Government did not build your business

And Business did not build the roads that they use

 

[OODA_Loop]

Government did not build your business

And Business did not build the roads that they use

Sure they did.....tax money and conditions of development.

All the time.

All over.

All right.

 

[rightwinger]

Government did not build your business

And Business did not build the roads that they use

Sure they did.....tax money and conditions of development.

All the time.

All over.

All right.

Sorry, but your tax money won't build many roads and no bridges. You have to rely on the tax money of everyone over a period of decades to build the roads and bridges your business relies on

 

[OODA_Loop]

Government did not build your business

And Business did not build the roads that they use

Sure they did.....tax money and conditions of development.

All the time.

All over.

All right.

Sorry, but your tax money won't build many roads and no bridges. You have to rely on the tax money of everyone over a period of decades to build the roads and bridges your business relies on

Precisely my point. And when business wanes, tax revenue deceases and government cuts.

Chicken.

Egg.

 

[Mac1958]

.

Y'know, here's a crazy thought: Obama said multiple things in that speech. I know we live in binary, black & white, all or nothing, absolutist times, but it's possible to agree with parts of what he said and disagree with others.

I know, that sounds kooky here.

Obviously government plays a role in the operation of a business. That fact is so obvious and fundamental that it's insulting to the intelligence that it would even be argued from either side. Balancing and moderating regulations and costs and efficiencies of government involvement are key, of course, but government is clearly attached to business. Duh.

Uh oh, "balancing and moderating", two dirty words here for the absolutists. My apologies.

My problem is with the way Obama put words in the mouths of business owners when he talked about they "think" that they're surviving and/or successful because they're smarter than anyone else and have worked harder than anyone else. None of the hundreds of business owners I work with has ever said or inferred that in my presence, not a single fucking one of them. And I'm told this by a guy who has never come close to running a business, as he was playing to a similar crowd of people.

Obama mocked business owners for political gain, and that pissed me off. I know how dumb my opinion is on this, I've been called a vast range of delightful names for it.

But this "no government in business" bullshit is silly.

.

 

[uscitizen]

Who ever said Government built your business?

That is stupid?

Actually historically speaking government has built several businesses.
The bomb and military munitions businesses.
The nuculear industry.
The space industry contractors.

And do not forget the tax preparation industry
HR Block exists because of taxes.

 

[Steelplate]

Government did not build your business

And Business did not build the roads that they use

Sure they did.....tax money and conditions of development.

All the time.

All over.

All right.

and so did the rest of the country...or do only business tax dollars count?

 

[OODA_Loop]

and so did the rest of the country...or do only business tax dollars count?

No. It also doesnt mean business owes more taxes.

 

[chanel]

For me, the most audacious remark was about being "smarter" and working "harder" than others. He obviously feels that successful business owners are either just lucky or are crooks. He has zero understanding of the skills necessary to lead, manage, and succeed.. Kinda disgusting, considering his position.

 

[Bfgrn]

.

Y'know, here's a crazy thought: Obama said multiple things in that speech. I know we live in binary, black & white, all or nothing, absolutist times, but it's possible to agree with parts of what he said and disagree with others.

I know, that sounds kooky here.

Obviously government plays a role in the operation of a business. That fact is so obvious and fundamental that it's insulting to the intelligence that it would even be argued from either side. Balancing and moderating regulations and costs and efficiencies of government involvement are key, of course, but government is clearly attached to business. Duh.

Uh oh, "balancing and moderating", two dirty words here for the absolutists. My apologies.

My problem is with the way Obama put words in the mouths of business owners when he talked about they "think" that they're surviving and/or successful because they're smarter than anyone else and have worked harder than anyone else. None of the hundreds of business owners I work with has ever said or inferred that in my presence, not a single fucking one of them. And I'm told this by a guy who has never come close to running a business, as he was playing to a similar crowd of people.

Obama mocked business owners for political gain, and that pissed me off. I know how dumb my opinion is on this, I've been called a vast range of delightful names for it.

But this "no government in business" bullshit is silly.

.

Whoever wrote Obama's speech should be replaced for putting words in a order that created this dishonest out of context attack by the right.

But what the President is saying I totally agree with. There are two alternatives going forward as to how we address problems and our debt.

The President:

On the one side you’ve got my opponent in this presidential race and his Republican allies...they’ve got a basic theory about how you grow the economy. And the theory is very simple: They think that the economy grows from the top down. So their basic theory is, if wealthy investors are doing well then everybody does well. So if we spend trillions of dollars on more tax cuts mostly for the wealthy, that that’s somehow going to create jobs, even if we have to pay for it by gutting education and gutting job-training programs and gutting transportation projects, and maybe even seeing middle-class folks have a higher tax burden.

So that’s part number one, right. More tax cuts for those at the top.

Part number two is they believe if you tear down all the regulations that we’ve put in place -- for example, on Wall Street banks or on insurance companies or on credit card companies or on polluters -- that somehow the economy is going to do much, much better. So those are their two theories. They’ve got the tax cuts for the high end, and they’ve got rollback regulation.

Now, here’s the problem. You may have guessed -- we tried this. We tried this in the last decade and it did not work.

But I just want to point out that we tried their theory for almost 10 years, and here’s what it got us: We got the slowest job growth in decades. We got deficits as far as the eye can see. Your incomes and your wages didn’t go up. And it culminated in a crisis because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street and they could make reckless bets with other people’s money that resulted in this financial crisis, and you had to foot the bill. So that’s where their theory turned out.

Now, we don’t need more top-down economics. I’ve got a different view. I believe that the way you grow the economy is from the middle out. I believe that you grow the economy from the bottom up. I believe that when working people are doing well, the country does well.

I believe in fighting for the middle class because if they’re prospering, all of us will prosper. That’s what I'm fighting for, and that’s why I'm running for a second term as President of the United States.

Now, this is what I've been focused on since I've been in office. In 2008, I promised to make sure that middle-class taxes didn’t go up. And in fact, because of the recession, you needed some help, so we cut the typical family's income taxes by $3,600. So if you hear somebody say that I'm a big tax guy, just remember $3,600 for the typical family. That’s the tax break you've gotten since I've been in office.

Four years later, I'm running to keep middle-class taxes low. So this week, I called on Congress to immediately extend income tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income. Now, what that means is 98 percent of Americans make less than $250,000, so 98 percent of folks would have the certainty and security that your taxes, your income taxes would not go up a dime. And, by the way, this is not a hypothetical. This wasn't some campaign promise. The reason I called on Congress to act now is because if they don’t do anything, on January 1st, almost everybody here, your taxes will go up an average of $1,600.

So we need to stop that tax hike from happening.

So you would think that this makes sense, right, because the Republicans say they're the party of no new taxes, right? That’s what they always say. Except so far, they've refused to act. And this might confuse you. You might say, why would they not want to give 98 percent of Americans the certainty of this income tax cut?

Well, it turns out they don’t want you to get your tax break unless the other 2 percent, the top 2 percent, they get their tax break as well.

Now, understand, the top 2 percent, folks like me, we're the ones who most benefited over the last decade from not only tax breaks, but also a lot of the money from increased profits and productivity went up to that top 2 percent. So the bottom line is, the top 2 percent doesn’t need help. They're doing just fine.

And I understand why they wouldn’t want to pay more in taxes. Nobody likes to pay more in taxes. Here's the problem: If you continue their tax breaks, that costs a trillion dollars. And since we're trying to bring down our deficit and our debt, if we spend a trillion dollars on tax cuts for them, we're going to have to find that trillion dollars someplace else. That means we're going to have to maybe make student loans more expensive for students. Or we might have to cut back on the services we're providing our

Or we might have to stop investing in basic science and research that keeps us as a leading-edge economy. Or, as they suggested, maybe you would have to turn Medicare into a voucher program.

I don’t think those are good ideas. So what I've said to the Republicans is, look, all right, let's have this debate about the tax cuts for the wealthiest folks. I don’t mind having that debate. But in the meantime, let's go ahead and do what we agree on, which is give 98 percent of Americans some certainty and some security. (Applause.) So far, they haven't taken me up on my offer.

 

[OODA_Loop]

Tell my why I should trust Obama on economic policy again ?