Profits Soar, No Hiring

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Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost. So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons.

AlterNet Excerpt:

First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that’s where they’re investing and expanding production.

Second, big U.S. businesses are investing their cash in labor-saving technologies. This boosts their productivity, but not their payrolls.

Finally, corporations are using their pile of money to pay dividends to their shareholders and buy back their own stock – thereby pushing up share prices.” – Robert Reich

Yes, and whatever little excess cash working-class American consumers have, they're spending it at Wal-Mart.

This should not even be an argument, but instead we have republicans like our own Congressman Paul Ryan claiming that the free markets are reluctant to create jobs because of tax uncertainty. His approach is to instill more fear in defense of the Bush tax cuts for his largest campaign shareholders.

The Bush tax cuts were signed into law in May, 2003 and had the cuts really worked as some contended, we would be on the cusp of the greatest period of job expansion right now, not the worst economic contraction. Instead, the tax cuts seeded the fastest growing national deficits ever while the disappearance of jobs in America have very little to do with tax policy.