The New American Dream
by digby
Joshua Holland has a great piece up today about Rick Perry’s “Texas Miracle.” Read the whole thing for the details about why the Federal stimulus saved him even as he demonized it and how the only reason they’ve “created” more jobs is because they’ve had a huge influx low wage labor from Latin America that needs to buy toothpaste and milk from somebody. But this conclusion tells the tale:
At a fundraiser this week, Rick Perry, who despite toying with the idea of secession in the past may now be eying a White House bid, told a group of Republican fat-cats that in his state, “you don’t have to use your imagination, saying, ‘What’ll happen if we apply this or that conservative principle?’ You just need to look around, because they’ve been in play across our state for years, generating real results.”
In this, Perry is absolutely, 100 percent correct. He slashed taxes to the bone, handing out credits to his political cronies like they were candy. He decried the evils of Big Government while hypocritically using federal stimulus funds to help close Texas’ budget gap in the short term, and now he’s using the state’s longer term fiscal disaster – one of his own creation – as a premise for destroying an already threadbare social safety net serving the neediest Texans. As a result of these policies, plus immigration and other external factors, his state’s added a lot of low-paying poverty jobs without decent benefits. He’s added very little in the way of “prosperity.”
But that truly is a big success in GOP terms. The thing to remember is that they have managed to crate most new jobs at the minimum wage level while seeing their wealthiest “producers” make tons of money (on which they pay nothing in taxes.)That’s their version of the American dream.
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