Henry Ford, that old commie, may really have been onto something when he paid his workers enough to afford to buy what he was selling.
In this must-see 6-minute TED talk* — initially withheld from a wider audience — serial entrepreneur Nick Hanauer makes the case that it’s the middle class who are the job creators.
So if we went back to tax rates high enough to pay people decently to modernize our crumbling infrastructure, we’d accomplish three things: We’d put those people to work. We’d arrest the decay (even, here and there, leapfrog back into first place). And — by returning people to the middle class — we’d be swelling the ranks of the job creators. America’s normally virtuous economic cycle, disrupted at times of massive inequality, could resume. Powerfully.
This is exactly the opposite of what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan propose.
It is exactly the opposite of what Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Scarborough, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin preach.
It is exactly the opposite of what the Koch brothers (who are busily buying Congress and the White House) hope they are paying for.
*Thanks to reader Mark Langenderfer for reminding me of this talk.
