The Monies: Rick Santorum’s 0/0/0 Plan

You might have seen Herman Cain (you know, the guy who used to sell pizzas but now wants to be the President) going around touting his 9/9/9 plan, in which he says that if elected he will institute a 9% flat corporate tax, a 9% flat income tax and a 9% national sales tax and abolish all other taxes (including capital gains taxes, Social Security taxes and payroll taxes). This plan seems really smart until you spend five seconds thinking about it – not only does it shift the tax burden onto the lower-class (who, as they spend the majority of the money they make just to stay afloat as opposed to the rich, who tend to save and invest the majority of their money, thereby skating past that 9% sales tax), but it would cause the biggest federal deficit since World War II. So yeah, that’s pretty stupid, right?

Enter Rick Santorum. Never one to be out-stupided, Santorum came up with his answer to Cain’s 9/9/9 plan, and it’s sheer political genius: the Santorum 0/0/0 plan.

What exactly does a 0/0/0 plan consist of? I’ll let Rick explain it for himself:

Twenty-one percent of the people working in this country when I was growing up were involved in manufacturing. Now, it’s nine. We need to get those jobs back. How? Zero corporate income tax on any manufacturer or processor in this country. Because those manufacturing jobs left this country, there’s $1.2 trillion in corporate profits sitting all over that won’t come back because of taxes. Zero corporate tax on all of that money brought back if, in fact, it is invested in plants in this country… And zero, we will zero out and repeal every regulation the Obama administration has put in place. That is a hundred million dollars to business and more.

Let me point out a bit of crucial semantics here: I called Santorum’s plan political genius, not actual genius. That’s because it’s about as fucking stupid as an economic plan can be without being Michele Bachmann’s “you should keep all of the money you earn and pay no taxes at all” plan. I’ll enumerate plenty of reasons for that below. But it’s political genius because anyone who has eaten enough lead paint to actually consider Santorum a viable candidate for President is physically incapable of the chimpanzee-level common sense required to see how completely moronic the plan is. Excited by the seemingly simple solution to all of our economy’s problems and the imminent creation of billions of dickwit-level manufacturing jobs in the US, these slobbering troglodytes will lope joyfully to their polling stations – or a Port-o-let that they mistake for a polling station – and cast their vote for Rick. Or take a shit. Honestly, they’re approximately equivalent actions.

So why is this plan so stupid? Well, let’s pick it apart a bit, shall we?

“Zero corporate income tax on any manufacturer or processor in this country”

Hey, that’s great. Tax cuts on manufacturers that do their work inside the US means they’ll have more money to create more jobs, right? Not so fast. You see, ever since the big crash of ‘08, corporations have been hoarding record amounts of cash. This seems like a logical reaction to scary economic times, but we see the same behavior decade after decade, regardless of how the overall economy is doing: companies report record profits then lay off workers so that the next year they can report record profits again. So unless this amazing 0% corporate tax rate comes with a caveat that companies must use the savings from their reduced taxes to create new jobs (which, by the way, would require an enormous amount of government oversight to enforce – you know, those horrible regulators that Santorum blasts later on in the piece) then there is absolutely no guarantee that there will be substantial job creation. Sure, that might be a slightly jaundiced and pessimistic view but hey, can you blame me?

And all of that is aside from the basic, fundamental question that nobody ever wants to ask when politicians talk about cutting taxes: if we’re not taxing anyone, how the fuck do we pay for the government? Sure, we can make cuts. Hell, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a sane and rational American who doesn’t think that our government spending is way out of control. But there are still things we have to pay for: our enormous military, our crumbling infrastructure, the salaries for asshole public employees like the President. Zero tax means zero income. Everyone likes to talk about how the government needs to “live within its means like we all do”, but if you cut the means out, there’s no way to live within them.

“Zero corporate tax on [repatriated income] if…it is invested in plants in this country”

Hey, I can’t even argue with the theory here – if multinational corporations are wiling to repatriate the money they have invested in foreign countries and they pinky swear that they will only invest that money in new manufacturing plants inside the United States, they won’t have to pay taxes on it. Sounds pretty good, actually. Except that even with the 0% corporate income tax on manufacturers Santorum is proposing, the American labor market still can’t compete with places like China, Indonesia and Mexico for one simple reason: workers are expensive here.

Let’s face it, we’ve sorta worked ourselves into a corner on that one. We have created some of the best quality of life on the planet here in the United States, but that does not come free. The cost of living here is astronomically higher than in the second- and third-world countries that do most of our manufacturing for us now, and that means that you have to pay your workers more so that they can continue to do frivolous things like eat and sleep in a house at night. So for this plan to be effective, to truly lure manufacturing jobs back from Taiwan and Mexico, we’re going to have to lower wages. And nobody in this country who is not the CEO of a major corporation is in favor of that. And rightly so: we have already hit a turning point in the history of America where each successive generation can expect to live less well than their parents’ generation. Why would we take an active role in increasing that? Does it not completely negate the positive effect of creating new jobs when those new jobs pay less and less in order to keep the country competitive with El Salvador in the manufacturing sector?

This all comes down to the fine-point but important distinction between “creating jobs” and “creating good jobs”. Every single politician right now is preaching pure numbers – they have/will/want to/demand that somebody else create x-number of jobs. But nobody is really talking qualitatively: is it better to create 10,000 part-time minimum-wage jobs or 2,000 full-time good-paying jobs? Me, I say the former. Because if all we’re doing by creating scores of low-wage jobs is forming a new kind of serfdom, then we are not doing anyone but the already-rich any favors. It’s not enough to simply bring “manufacturing jobs” back to the United States. That doesn’t guarantee that we will go back to the good old 1950s where everyone worked in the Plant for life and everybody was middle-class and happy. It’s 20-fucking-11, America. It’s cheaper to build a shoe in the Philippines, load it on an airplane and fly it around the world fifty times than it is to build that shoe for a decent living wage in the United States. That’s what globalization has gotten us. So though repatriating all of that money in order to create jobs seems like a good start, what does it actually cost to make it effective?

“Zero out and repeal every regulation the Obama administration has put in place”

Ah, regulation: the great bugbear of Capitalism. Regulations are the evil spells that Liberals cast to turn businesses into frogs until a handsome Republican comes along and kisses them, repealing the regulations and turning them back into beautiful businesses again. Also, they’re the things that ensure that the water your children drink isn’t filled with lead, mercury and carcinogens. And that the air you breathe is, well, breathable. And that corporations aren’t just building a pipeline into your local aquifer to dump their toxic waste.

The truth of the matter is, no matter how often Republicans scream about job-killing regulations, facts show that the implementation of regulations has a negligible effect on job numbers. Here’s what Roger Noll, co-director of the Program on Regulatory Policy at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research has to say about how regulations should be chosen:

The issue in regulation always should be whether it delivers benefits that justify the cost.The effect of regulation on jobs has nothing to do with the mess we’re in. The current rhetoric about regulation killing jobs is nothing more than not letting a good crisis go to waste.

So why does zeroing-out every regulation that Obama administration put in place help us in any way? And why (other than the obvious rhetoric bonuses) stop with the Obama administration? There are a lot of outdated and frankly counter-productive regulations on the books that have been around since the 1970s. Why not start with updating and specifying those, so that we ease some of the regulatory burden while still guaranteeing that our beautiful country doesn’t turn into a toxic cancer dump? Tell me this, Rick Santorum: would you rather live in an America with no regulation where everyone is slightly richer and the entire ecosystem has been destroyed to the point where the air, water and soil are toxic, or in an intelligently regulated country where we can breathe, drink and eat without worry but corporations make, in your completely un-sourced estimate, “a hundred million dollars or more” extra?

This is what I’m getting at, guys, and it’s a huge part of my disgust with American politics: there is so much rhetoric that flies around this country as presidential elections near that is completely baseless and poorly thought-out, but that the mindless masses lap up like so much whipped cream off of Megan Fox’s ass. I am not an economist. I am not a mathematician. I am barely able to dress myself most mornings. But I spent fifteen minutes thinking about this stupid fucking idea, and even I came up with a dozen reasons why it could never work. But I guarantee you that if Santorum says it three more times there will be a half a dozen Fox News hosts practically masturbating on camera while they titter about how it’s a genius plan that will save our country. Now that I’ve said that, you’re going to spend the rest of the day picturing Sean Hannity masturbating. Sorry. Here’s a picture of Megan Fox to make up for it.

We need a return to rational discussion in this country instead of the absurd screaming match that politics has become. The voices throwing blame and shouting idiotic fixes have completely drowned out the voices of people who are willing to talk things through and come up with a viable solution, and that is precisely the reason this country can’t pull itself out of the tailspin we’re in. I know I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here, but let’s all join together to reject reactionary and inflammatory ideas like Santorum’s 0/0/0 debacle and find a real answer to our problems.

Also, let’s all take a moment to bask in the glory of Megan Fox. I think everyone, regardless of their political ideology or dogmatic bent, can agree that it’s been far too long since I’ve put her in one of my posts.

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