Who's Looking Out For You?

Pundit Bill O'Reilly is always asking (and penned a book by that name) "who's looking out for you?" Well, I think we are now seeing whose interests are being protected and promoted and it isn't the citizens of middle America. The next time you hear someone on the right complaining about some woman on welfare collecting an extra check, just remember who the biggest welfare recipients are!

It's almost enough to make you laugh—bitterly, of course. Here was Ford Motor Co. announcing yesterday that it had cut 10,000 jobs last year and that it will cut up to 30,000 more. But shedding jobs at muscle-car acceleration rates didn't stop Ford from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of the American Jobs Creation Act.

No, I'm not making this up. Right there, on page 2 of one of its news releases yesterday, Ford said that 'repatriation of foreign earnings pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 resulted in a permanent tax savings of about $250 million.'

Hello? How can you simultaneously cut jobs and benefit from the American Jobs Creation Act? Welcome to the wonderful world of Washington nomenclature.

Ford, understandably, declined to expand on its news release. But my calculations indicate that Ford last year brought into the United States about $850 million of profit that it had earned overseas but did not have to share with the Internal Revenue Service.

Big businesses are getting paid while thousands of blue collar workers (mostly white) are going to lose almost everything they've ever known. They wanted Reagan and Bush? They got them. I wonder how it's working for them?