"Job Creators" Are Much Like "Inconceivable"

...If you're a Republican, it doesn't mean what you think it means.

The thing about "job creators" that the Republicans have missed the last four years and will keep missing the next four unless the lot of them get bashed in the face with a clue-by-four is who they actually are.  Obviously, people who create jobs.  But what the GOP fails to understand is who really does that and how they do it.

The people who directly create jobs are very often well-off enough to have a business of their own, yes.  But the thing about a business is that it needs income in order to pay its employees and buy its supplies and still have profit left over.  Where does that money come from?

Look in the mirror.

Yes, you.  That money that keeps businesses running and keeps the paychecks flowing comes from you.  It comes from me.  It comes from your friends and neighbors and your bus driver and your teacher and that woman who bags your groceries and that college kid who made your latte this morning.  It comes from everyone in the country who buys things, and the majority of that everyone is not made up of Fortune 100 CEOs.

Rich people do have more disposable income than the rest of us, yes, and can spend much more than any of us can as individuals.  But there are a lot more of us than there are of them, so collectively we spend money in far greater quantities.

I see it at my job all the time.  The majority of people who come into my store looking for new cool stuff they don't really need but really really want are not upper class.  And you can tell they're not upper class because the average person who makes $250K/year is not going to do a ten-minute cost-benefit analysis with you on an item that's under $50.  The average person who makes $250K/year is not going to camp out on Thanksgiving in anticipation of Black Friday because their sleep is more valuable to them than the money they'll be saving on that doorbuster.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with not having the money to drop $50 on a whim, and to have to shop on Black Friday because you won't be able to afford that item otherwise.  My point is that the millions of people I see every day who do that are not rich.  But I see way the hell more of them as customers than the ones who have the money to buy out my entire stockroom, and still have enough for dinner at Joe's Stone Crabs.

It's the middle-class people who are the fabled "job creators" because it's their money that gives me my tiny-but-vital paycheck.  If they weren't buying things, there would not be demand for my job.  And no company worth its salt is going to create jobs they don't need to just to put people to work.

With this in mind, now remember the trickle-down economics that the Republicans have been trying to sell you for decades, and see if you don't feel like you're being approached by some creepy guy on a subway platform trying to get you to buy a wooden iPad for $200.

Because giving rich people more money that they're not going to spend in enough quantities to matter will not grow anything except their bank accounts.

You grow an economy the way you grow a tree; by watering the soil, not the leaves.  So that you have solid roots and a strong trunk so it doesn't get blown over in the first nasty wind that hits it.  You can even have a tree with no leaves at all in the wintertime when resources are scarce.  You can't have a tree without a trunk and a root system.

 The GOP's policy of watering the leaves and assuring us that it will somehow reach the rest of the tree, biology be damned, is going to do nothing but destroy the parts of the tree that make it a tree in the first place.  Trickle-down economics does way worse than merely not work; it prevents any other strategy or action from being taken.  When the tax cuts are going to rich people, who in turn donate to the lawmakers who give them the tax cuts so they can get re-elected and then pocket the rest, what you have is an infinite closed loop of money that doesn't create one single goddamned job.  Because it's not reaching the people who truly create those jobs: us.