Who are America’s real job creators? The people — and they’re broke

By Jim Hightower

OtherWords

As narrators used to say in Western movies: “Meanwhile, back at the ranch...”

Our policymakers in Washington have totally lost sight of what’s happening at the ranch. John Boehner’s GOP-controlled House and Barack Obama’s White House have agreed to slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, as though that’s America’s most important need.

Middle-class jobs

If they’d lift their vision to the countryside, even they could figure out that our great economic urgency is for the creation of good, middle-class jobs to get America moving again — moving upward and moving together.

Today, we are a dangerously disunited society. Elite CEOs and big investors are grabbing all the gains, leaving the vast majority mired in recession and facing falling incomes. Since the recession technically “ended” 18 months ago, corporate profits have zoomed, sopping up an unprecedented 88 percent of America’s economic growth. Meanwhile, only 1 percent of the growth that we all help produce has gone to wages and salaries, the primary sources of income for 90 percent of us.

Workers

Yet, those same CEOs say they won’t invest in new jobs or raise wages until consumers start buying again. Hello? The consumers whom CEOs are waiting on are the workers whose jobs and wages the CEOs won’t increase.

You see, despite the GOP’s ideological claptrap about corporate executives being “job creators,” it’s ordinary Americans who actually create jobs by spending from their paychecks.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. He wrote this for OtherWords, a project of the Policy Institute.