In the Presidential race this year, what do you think are
the most important issues? I can think
of a lot of very important issues, but there are some issues that I call the
iceberg sinking the ship. If the ship
sinks, nothing else is going to matter.
And, yes, the ship is sinking.
The first issue of that of jobs. And when I say ‘first,’ I am not ranking these issues as to the order of their importance. If a ship is sinking, you need to fix all the holes. Some holes will sink the ship faster than the others, but any one of them will sink the ship.
When there are not enough good paying jobs for everybody, it
drives people to depend on the government for financial assistance. For many people who either don’t understand
the concept of freedom or who do understand but want to change the fundamental
nature of our country, government dependency is a good thing. They call it compassion and a safety net, but
the result of this and the intent of many of these people is to increase the
role of government in the lives of everybody.
So why would they want to do that, and why would that be a
bad thing? Throughout history, there
have been essentially only two forms of government: tyranny and freedom. Most governments throughout history have been
tyrannies. Life isn’t necessarily
miserable under a ruler, but there are restraints on the things a person can do
and obligations that not everyone will like.
But then that’s the case everywhere, right? But we forget that our nation fought a war to
get the kind of government and the freedoms that we have, or at least the
freedoms that may now only still exist on paper.
When we think of tyrannies, we usually think of kings or
dictators where one person basically rules the country, and this often happens
with a violent takeover; but freedom can be lost piece by piece as people
gradually trade freedoms for security, prosperity for a safety net, and
responsibility for dependency.
When you have a massive government with an ever increasing
number of rules and laws, the will and the power to force compliance on more
and more things that were not issues in the past, when the government believes
it is responsible for the economy and is responsible for solving all the
problems of society, then your government is going from freedom to tyranny. With the rise of the United States, these two
forms of government exist less as absolutes, but countries are seeing a wide
range of degrees of freedom and tyranny.
Our nation is moving slowly from freedom to tyranny. Instead of being ruled by the King of
England, we are being ruled more and more by government officials who on the
surface want to protect us from ourselves and the evil around us, but who are
motivated just as much by the power and the money that comes with their
position.
The issue of jobs is possibly the single most important
factor in preserving our freedoms, because when a person can no longer provide
for oneself or one’s family, they cry out for somebody to take care of
them. Our churches used to be the
primary source of public charity in our country, but the government has now taken
over that role. This causes the government to grow, requiring more of your
money and expanding the government’s reach into every area of your life. The loss of jobs reduces revenues to the
government while at the same time creates pressure on the government to grow,
assume more responsibility, increase governmental spending, and consequently
government debt.
The government has now become responsible for the welfare of
the people. The government is now the
protector and provider of the people.
The government has assumed responsibility for, and consequently the
control of, the economy.
So the economy is basically about freedom, but according to
Forbes[1],
more than half the people in our country now receive some form of government
aid. So even though people vote for
their representatives, the way they vote is usually determined by who will best
take care of them. And many voting
districts have been drawn in ways that almost ensure the reelection of the
people already in office.
When this happens slowly and each new generation is not
taught what freedom is all about and each new generation gets used to the
increasing role of government in their lives, freedom is traded for rulers who
are now looked upon as our benefactors.
The loss of good jobs has also been a large factor in the
deterioration of our families and as a result the moral deterioration of our
country. Those who do work work more
jobs and more hours to try to provide for their families and more and more
parenting is done by day cares, and raising children becomes a lot like having
pets. Feed them twice a day, and see
that they don’t soil up the house. The lack of good jobs takes parents out of the
homes and children are raised too often by people who have little or no vested
interest in their lives.
Broken families lead to more crime, but it also contributes to
the moral breakdown of our country. What
I mean by moral breakdown is that there are a lot of things that are wrong but
not illegal. All kinds of corruption,
mean-spiritedness, unkindness, abuse, exploitation, indifference, negligence,
selfishness, hatred, anger, things that laws either don’t touch or can’t fix,
come from the breakdown of the family.
Bringing American jobs back to our country will do more than probably
any other one thing to help our country economically, but also in strengthening
our country morally.
So why did we lose all these jobs? Labor has almost always been cheaper
overseas, but the jobs didn’t leave to get cheaper labor. Our corporate taxes are among if not the
highest in the world, but the jobs didn’t leave because of high corporate
taxes. Corporate tax rates were raised
to help make up for all the money the government no longer was getting from
working people. We are told that we must
lower our corporate tax rates to bring jobs back to our country, but if that
isn’t why they left, it won’t make much difference in bringing them back.
The jobs left as we stopped taxing imports.
We have forgotten that taxes on imports paid for almost our
entire federal budget for most of our nation’s history. There was no federal income tax before
1916.
We are told that taxing imports will raise the prices that
consumers pay for those goods. But if we
remember that these taxes are paid to the government, we can and should expect our
government to lower our income taxes.
We are told that Herbert Hoover raised taxes on imports as
the Great Depression was just starting, and that was responsible for prolonging
and intensifying it. But the Great
Depression lasted for another eight years or so under Franklin Delano Roosevelt
who raised all kinds of taxes and created all kinds of government programs, and
nobody thinks that had anything to do with prolonging the Depression?
Without taxes on imports, the jobs will stay overseas.
We are told that taxing imports will start trade wars, where
other nations will tax the goods we send to them, thus hurting our export
industry. This has been the cry of those
who don’t mind having so many of our companies overseas.
They talk about all the wonderful export opportunities. But this wasn’t an issue for the 140 years before we had
an income tax, and this wasn’t an issue before we stopped taxing imports and
sent our jobs overseas
We are told that taxing imports will raise the prices of
everything we are still bringing into our country. Yes, and we didn’t need an income tax prior
to 1916 when we used to do that. If the
government wouldn’t take so much of our money, our income would go up without
even getting a raise. Is that just a
simple trade off, exchanging higher prices for income taxes? Not quite.
If more people have jobs, the decrease in income tax rates would far
exceed the added cost for consumer goods.
That was how our nation’s wealth was built in the first place.
We are told that the world now has a global economy, that we have
to support a global economy, and that to resist it is economic suicide. By a global economy, they mean simply free
trade, no taxes on imported goods. They
use words like protectionism and nationalism to describe those who oppose this,
as though we are supposed to understand these words as obvious proofs of these
people’s folly.
We are told in so many words that putting the needs and interests
of our own nation over that of other nations is somehow selfish, arrogant, and
benefits us at the expense of other nations, like there is only so much wealth
in the world and if we get more, somebody else will have less. They are forgetting that wealth is created,
by manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and fishing. They don’t need our companies in their
countries for them to gain wealth.
We are talking about our companies making our products to send
back to us. If these same countries
would make these same products for their own country, they would prosper as
well. Why are these other countries
depending on our companies making our goods over there for their prosperity?
Foreign goods were always available in our country, and we
always paid a premium for them. But
these were foreign products, like Swiss chocolate and German watches, not
American companies making things somewhere else and then shipping those
products back here.
Our political leaders have forgotten our Constitution, which our
Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish it. Our
government exists to promote the general welfare of the people of the United
States. It’s like when parents give
everything they have to their children.
That doesn’t mean that they hate or don’t care about the other children on
the block. But they can only be
responsible for those that belong to them over whom they have some control or
major influence. We cannot control the
events, the people, and the governments of other countries, so frankly they
have to take care of themselves, except perhaps in the case of a major natural
disaster.
Bangladesh has 156 million people. So if we didn’t make our shirts there, we
would be hurting their economy? They
can’t support a thriving clothing industry with a market that large. When we made all of our own stuff here, we
have jobs for everybody, and they were good paying jobs as well. And that wouldn’t work anywhere else?
We are told that globalization is good for everybody because
everything is now cheaper. What they are
not telling us is that, with globalization, everybody is making a lot less
money too as a global labor market keeps driving wages downward. A global economy is like adding 3 billion people to the labor
force. There are always people who will
work for less somewhere in the world, and wages go down everywhere else to try
to compete with that.
Rich nations become poorer, and poor nations stay poor. They’re not starting their own businesses;
they’re just relying on ours.
And,
besides, it is a very dangerous policy to build or base an economy on
exports. That means that our prosperity
depends first on the prosperity of other nations so that they can buy our
goods. Basing our economic health on a
global economy ties the economic health of all the nations together such that a
problem in one country affects all the others.
What this does is create a new normal of a sluggish world economy. Some major country is always experiencing
some kind of downturn or economic crisis.
This
ideal world of free trade also requires everybody to ‘play fair,’ nobody gaming
the system by manipulating their currencies.
So the experts want to build a global economic system that requires
nobody cheating for it to really work? Seriously? You want to build a system that every nation
in the world is dependent on but that requires everybody to follow all the
rules? Quite frankly, I think the
motivation behind this is resentment for the United States being so
prosperous. At least it used to be. Before the jobs went overseas, our federal
debt was minimal. Now it is almost 20
trillion dollars and counting. And, yes,
the two are related, and we won’t fix the one without fixing the other.
How
can we have a robust American economy when it is dependent on nations all over
the world having the money to buy our stuff first? We have 330 million people in our own
country. If that is not enough of a
market for a company to prosper, please don’t blame our trade policies.
Before
the jobs went overseas, we had plenty of jobs for everyone, good paying jobs,
and our nation prospered. Taxes on
imports went away, and the jobs went away, government debt skyrocketed, and wages
stagnated. Between this and all the
immigration, legal and otherwise, we have record numbers of people on
government assistance, which ends up lowering the standard of living of
everyone through government borrowing, inflation, and higher taxes.
When we made all of our own stuff, the jobs grew as the
population grew. Now we don’t have
enough jobs for all the people who are living in our country, yet at the same
time the government keeps bringing millions more people into our country as
well as allowing untold numbers of people to just come in however they can.
So how do we bring the jobs back to our country? Corporate tax rates are too high. But they are high only to make up for all the
loss of revenue from the loss of jobs.
The jobs didn’t leave because tax rates were too high, though more have
left since they were raised. The jobs
didn’t leave because labor was cheaper somewhere else. Labor has always been cheaper somewhere else.
The jobs left because we stopped taxing imports. And they will not come back until we do that
again. So the Presidential candidates
all talk about this issue in various ways, but this issue needs to have a
national debate and to reach some kind of consensus. The reason is that moving a company from one
country to another is a major decision that can involve billions of dollars. If one President instituted a policy which
the next President would want to reverse or change, companies could be slow in
doing anything differently because the cost of changing could outweigh the cost
of staying put.
Right now most opinions you will hear on this matter support
free trade. Much of that I believe is due
to do politically correct thinking that views taxing imports as the work of
greedy American companies who want to charge high prices free from the
challenges of competition or the outdated notion of putting American interests
above that of other countries.
Taxing imports again is the most important means for
bringing jobs back to the United States, and frankly there is only one
candidate right now who has favored that. That would be Trump. I
believe both Clinton and Sanders are against this latest trade deal in the
Pacific region because of the potential loss of jobs, but I don’t think they
have said much about how they would bring back the jobs that have already left.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2014/07/02/weve-crossed-the-tipping-point-most-americans-now-receive-government-benefits/#56676bea6233
