We hear over and over how Obama and his policies have killed economic activity and jobs…..or that tax cuts will produce more employment…..or that the….well you get the idea….it is all so much crap!
Why would I say such a thing?
One of the shining lights, according to some, is Caterpilla…the heavy duty machine manufacturer….but look at this…
Seeking to bolster one of its more profitable business areas, Caterpillar Inc. agreed to acquire MWM Holding GmbH, a German maker of power-generation equipment, from 3i Group PLC and related investment funds for 580 million euros ($810 million).
3i, a British private-equity firm, bought the Mannheim, Germany-based company in 2007 for 360 million euros. The planned purchase is another move by Caterpillar to expand businesses outside its core areas of construction and mining …
Or maybe this….
Construction-equipment maker Caterpillar said Tuesday it will buy locomotive maker Electro-Motive Diesel for $820 million from a private-equity firm.EMD is one of the world’s oldest and best-known makers of locomotives, producing its first engine in 1922. The brand will remain unchanged as EMD’s brand is well-known in the rail industry.
So Caterpilla is spending about $1.5 billion on acquisitions….this will NOT create jobs…if anything some jobs will be lost because of the purchases…..none of this is to help put people back to work…..it is about the bottom line…the profits and the stock prices……business has NO desire to hire more people now and in the near future…it is more profitable the way it is today…..
So, give us a break! Stop harping on the extension of benefits for corporations…they have NO intention of hiring more people…..nice try though….but I am not that stupid as to believe the hype!
But the duty of a business (a corporation that is) is to make profits. It is the government’s duty to encourage the creation of jobs. It is NOT the fault of the business if what it does creates no jobs… the government should simply be doing something different!
For instance, if you encourage MANUFACTURING industry with tax breaks the size of which is set according to the number of employees, rather than Wall Street and banksters, then you will create more jobs in the shorter term. If you subsidise bona fide scientific research projects with foreseeable products as their aim, you will create short, middle and long term jobs. That is of course over simplifying and I do NOT suggest the creation of some huge bureaucracy to oversee its workings – but rather they are broad concepts that I hope demonstrate the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Apart from the fact that I loathe it, social engineering just plain doesn’t work because you can’t change people once they leave early childhood behind (so education is as ever key to that), but you CAN engineer the business strategy of a country – you are NOT forcing anyone to do anything they don’t want to do, but you ARE pushing business in the direction you would like it to take for the benefit of the whole country, both now and in the future…
I understand and would agree somewhat….but here whatever the government is doing is not working……under the premise that tax cuts create jobs we should have full employment thanx to the last 8 years…..instead we lost about 8 million….and yet business says it will bounce back if it gets more…..if it does….then it has been all about embarrassing Obama or setting the stage for the next election…