05.17.12
Blessed are the job creators
One of my friends is always sending me links for lectures posted at TED. I always delete them and send a retort meant to discourage the sending of more in the future. It bums him out that I’m this way.
The reason TED stuff is virtually worthless: It’s for semi-bright nerds and other simple-minded and easily led folk who actually believe its a web engine for the portrayal of genius and innovation. If you subscribe to Wired, you probably think it’s neat.
TED is for tech industry groupies, part of the culture of lickspittle. And today it’s in the news in a small way for spiking a talk on the US economy, one in which a TED lecturer — a venture capitalist you’ve never heard of named Nick Hanauer — argued that the wealthy aren’t job creators.
Paul Krugman has made the same point, much more successfully and to a much wider audience on the pages of the New York Times for the past few years. And I don’t believe he’s ever needed TED to get the word out.
It’s not a hard point to make because all the data is in.
So the only bit one needs to see is a slide, its information now published in many different ways by different people around the web, on the tax rates for the wealthy versus employment in this country.
It destroys any argument that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to more jobs for everyone else. In fact, just the opposite. There’s no more trickle-down than there is a tooth fairy. (But at least your parents put some coin under the pillow.)
Radically cutting taxes on the top over the long-term destroyed much of the economy for the middle class. Unemployment surged. It’s ugly.
Since these facts are anathema to all arguments about the economy put forward by the Republican Party, such information is often thought political.
So if you always thought TED was high-button excrement but couldn’t quite put your finger on what was shite about it, today’s news is an example. TED can’t deal with facts that might annoy its audience of libertarian tech shoeshine boys and girls.