The Quickest, Easiest Way to Fix Our Economy

The Quickest, Easiest Way to Fix Our Economy

Politics are constant word games.  If you propose a bill, it is almost required to include at least one of the following words: equal, fair, discrimination, freedom.  Anyone who opposes a bill with any of these words is obviously an extremist if not also sexist, racist, or any of a number of –ist words.

This same game was played several decades ago when trade agreements were proposed in Congress.  Charging a company for importing goods to our country was considered protectionist and unfair to developing nations.  So we stopped charging imports from different nations as they agreed not to charge us for shipping goods to their country. 

This was called free trade.  That should have been your first clue that something was wrong.  Nothing is free but the air you breathe. 

We tax our companies at one of if not the highest corporate tax rates in the world.  But then companies that we cannot tax, because they are foreign, can sell their stuff here at no cost to them? 

So what happened?  Millions of our jobs went overseas.

This was called inevitable.  Globalization. 

But did anybody ever ask why?  Why was this inevitable? 

But, no, it is not nor ever has been inevitable.

Countries have always traded with each other.  And for most of our nation’s history, imports were taxed.  Every nation taxed imports.  In fact, the taxes on imports almost paid our entire federal government’s expenses except in wartime until probably early in the 1900s when the 16^th Amendment was passed, allowing Congress to tax incomes. 

So what some people are calling free trade is really only free for other countries. 

Most of these imports are not from indigenous foreign companies in developing nations trying to get a seat at the table,  but these are mostly American jobs that went overseas because the cost of doing business here was too high.  And taxes are a big part of it.

This hype about helping developing countries is overplayed and just plain wrong.  For example, Bangladesh has a population of about 155,000,000 people, yet they make much of the clothes that we wear.  Do you mean to tell me that a clothing manufacturer in that country doesn’t have enough of a market in that 155M people to build a business?  These clothes are being made specifically for sale in the American market, because we have made things easier for companies to do everything over there than over here. 

If a nation does not have an internal market strong enough to build a thriving economy, then they have inherent structural deficiencies that our creating certain export industries over there is not going to be able to overcome.  This is a false guilt put on Western nations for being prosperous.  We are not prosperous just because we live over here and they live over there.  We have done things over here that they have not done over there. 

Wealth is not a limited pie that the world has to divide up.  Wealth is created, but like crops needing soil, air, water, seed, fertilizer, a country needs to provide the environment for economic growth.

Our political leaders are responsible for the lack of jobs in our country because of their greed, shortsightedness, and the belief that helping other countries was more important than helping our own.

Our country has gone from being the financially strongest nation in the world to the nation with the largest debt of any country in the world. True, some workers in other countries now have jobs they would not have had otherwise, but we have only traded our unemployed for their unemployed.  And why is that a good thing?

Is this supposed to help our economy that we can buy an appliance for a hundred dollars cheaper while our taxes and borrowing keep increasing, because we don’t have enough jobs over here? 

To call ourselves a rich nation is a misnomer.  There are a lot of wealthy people here, and most of the people here are better off than in any other nation of the world, including our poor people, yet our nation as a whole is broke, living off borrowed money, having sent millions of our jobs overseas so that now more people depend on other people supporting them in some way than are actually working fulltime.

So what is the simplest, easiest way to fix our economy? 

We need good paying, fulltime jobs for millions of people.  We used to have them.  They were called manufacturing jobs.  We lost them, because we tax our companies too high, and then we stopped taxing foreign companies (imports).

So what to do?  We want to make the United States the best place for a company to do business.  Why do people start companies in the first place?  Why do businesses exist?  They do not exist to make jobs.  They exist to make money.  The more companies there are here, and the more they can grow, the more jobs there will be.

Politicians want to tax corporations, because they are constantly looking for things to tax, because they need money to buy people’s votes.  But higher taxes on companies only raise the price of the goods and services they sell, which again makes products from other countries look cheaper, because we don’t tax them.

But if they were to, say, eliminate business taxes (wow, did I say that?) or at least cut them way down, this would all translate into companies flocking here and companies starting up, and millions of jobs being created.  And those workers would pay all those taxes we thought we were losing, plus we wouldn’t be paying for all their government assistance.

And we then need to tax imports to our country.  The simplest reason is that it is fair.  Our companies have financial obligations to our country that increases their cost of doing business.  A foreign company should bear some of that burden to do business here.