GOP fetishes

Tim Pawlenty sticks with failed Republican fetishized positions. Of course, Republicans think a tax cut can solve any problem.

But that's old news. The funny part is the constant refrain of small business this, small business that. Republicans don't really care about small business. They use it for protection from the true accusation that they are in the pocket of big business - and have been for many decades.

This is a case of a Democratic formula backfiring. Sometime around the 1970s, Dems wanted to reassure voters that they were in fact in favor of a strong economy, but they had been hammering big business so hard since the Great Depression that they had to make a distinction about which businesses deserved their help and advocacy.

Republicans quickly saw the advantages of this market positioning. After all, only a narrow niche of voters would ever find big business to be warm and fuzzy, and they already knew the GOP was buttering their bread.

Elite media loved and love this formula, too. Every economic downturn brings out formulaic stories about how many jobs small business creates. The better studies, though, show that small business does not create net jobs at anything like the scale of big business.

What you'll notice if you look closely at actual policy, as opposed to dishonest GOP marketing, is that Republican goals always help big business and leave a few crumbs for small business, much as their tax cut policies do for the very wealthy vs. the middle class.

At bottom, the Republicans' single most important policy position is tax cuts. The rest is just marketing. They don't really care whether a tax cut will solve a problem, economic or otherwise. They only care to lower their patrons' taxes.

In the end, we're back to the old news. The chant of "small business" is only about helping big business.