The Harris-Pence Debate and the GOP’s Big Jobs Lies

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The 2020 “vice-presidential” debate last night was a big ho-hum. It’s barely worth comment, except for three points. First, unlike the first presidential debate, it was civil and even respectful at times. Chalk up one for human decency and diplomacy, even at a time of extreme polarization.

Second, the debate confirmed my growing conviction that debating in presidential elections is a worthless anachronism. I learned as little from this debate as I had from the first one, which Trump converted into a hostile, mendacious verbal jousting match from its first moments.

In this case, the problem was not so much the candidates talking over each other—although there was some of that—but virtually ignoring the moderator. Both candidates repeatedly failed to answer the questions asked, some of which were quite cogent. Instead, they each tried to fill out their “dance cards” of talking points, heedless of the questions asked. If each had instead broadcast a 45-minute infomercial, they could have made the whole travesty more polished and interesting. The debate format, in my view, is now officially obsolete.

The third point is the only one that made writing this post worthwhile. Several times, Mike Pence hijacked the questions to repeat a tired, old GOP lie about jobs. It claims that taxes and regulations are job killers.

This simply isn’t so. It never has been so. But it’s a big lie that the GOP has used over decades now to delude and confuse workers.

Let’s take taxes first. Taxes don’t kill jobs because they don’t kill revenue. They just reduce profit. Every business has the right to deduct all reasonable costs of doing business from its revenue (and often some “freebies” like depletion allowances for oil wells) before applying the tax rate. So a business that’s profitable on an accounting basis will still be profitable after paying taxes. Its net after-tax profit will just be lower.

Taxes will not make a business less competitive if its competitors have to pay the same taxes. So there’s no reason why any tax on net revenue should kill any job. If one competitor gives up a certain business because its profit is not enough to slake its greed, that’s on its bosses, not the government. As long as competitors stay in business, the necessary jobs to satisfy demand will migrate to them.

More to the point, taxes go somewhere. They don’t just evaporate or go into Uncle Sam’s voracious maw, never to be seen again. They get recycled. For example, taxes go to pay the salaries of government officials and experts, soldiers, scientists, doctors like Fauci, inspectors of meats, drugs and food, IRS agents, and federal law-enforcement personnel. Let alone the fact that all these folks help keep us safe and sound: aren’t their jobs jobs, too?

Except for overhead, every dollar taken from a private business in taxes goes to support jobs in the public sector or some needy recipient of government benefits, like foodbank users during the current pandemic. As numerous studies show, these “safety net” patrons recycle their benefits far more quickly than the bosses of businesses, who hoard, save, and “invest” in luxuries and market speculation. Most of the “welfare” dollars about which Republicans complain so vociferously go right back into the general economy ASAP, where they also support private-sector jobs.

What Republicans really are complaining about is not the loss of jobs generally. It’s the loss of jobs in the businesses they or their donors own, control and dominate. This is just one more example of how the party of domination thinks.

Regulation doesn’t kill jobs either. That’s neither its purpose nor its effect. What it does is force businesses to keep their workplaces and products safe and to reduce their pollution of our air, water, land and soil to a reasonable minimum. If they can’t do that and still make a reasonable profit, then other businesses that can will take their places, and jobs in those other businesses will expand. If there’s good work to be done safely and cleanly, jobs will migrate to those who can do it, not the ones complaining.

Even if a whole sector can’t make the grade, then jobs will migrate to a new sector that can. Here the coal industry is a great example. Trump has tried to hold back the tides of technology and history by saving coal-mining jobs. Why? Coal mining dominates some small states, like Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming, where Trump can pick up some electoral-college votes easily by pandering to a dying industry.

But here’s the deal. Coal is a loser by any measure: worker safety, environmental soundness, and the basic cost of energy production. Coal is simply the dirtiest and least efficient fuel known to modern industry. So even after Trump’s administration killed the Obama-era rules against spewing greenhouse gases, polluting waterways and piling up toxic waste, coal simply couldn’t compete. Energy economics, not regulation, killed the biggest coal-fired plants in America, as outlined in a recent in-depth New York Times investigation.

But were all those jobs lost? Not on your life! They simply migrated to cleaner energy producers, including solar farms, wind farms and natural gas. Jobs in those cleaner industries are more widely distributed geographically than coal mining jobs, which must be where the coal mines are. So not only are there more jobs; they are better distributed around the country, and Trump’s small locked-in electoral-college states won’t get them all.

Even this picture is oversimplified. Regulation actually produces jobs because it requires people to make and enforce the rules. There are rulemakers and rule enforcers not just in OSHA and the EPA, but in all the equivalent worker-safety and environmental protection agencies of the fifty States. So regulations create good jobs in the public sector even as they shift jobs from dangerous and dirty industries like coal mining to safer, cleaner industries like solar and wind.

So let’s kill this canard once and for all, and let’s do it this election cycle. Taxes don’t kill jobs; obsolete, overpriced, unsafe and polluting businesses do. Taxes just move jobs around, sometimes to the public sector from the private sector, and sometimes from businesses that serve the rich to those that serve the middle class, the poor, and recipients of the benefits they need to stay alive and healthy.

Regulations also don’t kill jobs. They just move them from scofflaws to enforcers and from businesses that can’t make money without injuring workers or harming our environment to those that can. In other words, progressive taxes and regulation, properly applied, move jobs from businesses that can’t make progress to those that can.

For peddling these Big Lies as assiduously as did John Boehner—the guy who handed out tobacco-industry lobbying checks on the House floor [search for “tobacco”], let’s be sure to give Mike Pence the same old heave-ho!

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