This is a repost from an earlier thread, but the experience was so striking I wanted to mentio it again and then figured why bother repeating myself.

I recently had the "pleasure" of sitting through a presentation by one of the head US Chamber "economist".

The first half of the presentation was a straightforward presentation of facts and figures with realistic analysis and projections. I was pleasantly surprised.

Then in the second half the talk turned to policy and lost all touch with reality.

Much of the first part of the talk had been on fiscal responsibility and the danger of financing the government with debt, particularly foreign debt. But then in the second talk there was off hand mention about how this tax needs to be lessened and that tax, etc. etc. This with projected increasing spending by the government in the interim.

When I pointed this out and asked what taxes exactly would the Chamber recommend raising to balance the budget given the projected increases government spending (neither party has shown any ability to be responsible in this regard) the reply was none except perhaps a few on the poor. I do not necessarily disagree with raising taxes on the poor slightly, but to pretend this is going to offset all the proposed cuts AND make up for the deficit is a fantasy of the first order.

Then of course we went into the land of Reaganomics...

The economist suggested that overall tax revenues would be higher under a lower tax regime, and pointed out that as US taxes have gone lower and lower over the past century overall revenue has gone up and up, completely ignoring inflation and the growth in the overall economy. "And if taxes were 100% there would be no revenue" he quipped, "because no one would work".

But of course if taxes were 0% there wouldn't be any revenue either, and no one would work because your goods would be immediately stolen by your neighbors. No one is denying that there is some semi-ideal tax policy where overall revenues are maximized and that to have them too high or too low is obviously less optimal. But though this curve probably very roughly resembles a bell curve where we do not know where we are, the Chamber seems to always feel we should go to the left regardless of the evidence.

Nevermind, the fact we have the lowest tax regime of any major industrialized country, and that the others appear to get by.

As a last affront to common sense he concluded with a review of about 20 economic graphs from the last 25 years, all of which but one (corporate profits) showed better performance in the Clinton years than the Bush years. He gleaned from this, despite all the evidence to the contrary we were staring at, that the Bush years had proven to been much better than the Clinton years economically for the US and that Bush's economic policy was what we should be shooting for.

I guess we see when the Chamber talks about what is best for America, or "us" what they really mean is what is best for corporate profits. Perhaps we should re-institute slavery as well? That surely would help!

Thank you for this look inside... though you have my deepest condolences for having to endure it.

"Perhaps we should re-institute slavery as well?"

Some adjustments would need to be made: The corporations, along with the machinery they command, are the new slaves. We just need to organize to take full recognition of that arrangement.