There is a man running for Congress in my district who I offered to help. This is the fourth article I have written for him.
Before I talk about the best thing to do for our economy,
let me first talk about one of the worst things we do.. The only reason I mention one of the worst things
is that it is something that Democrats strongly believe in, and that is
government spending.
Imagine you are with your neighbors at a gathering. There are 10 of you, and you all make around
$50,000 a year. You decide to form a
small government for your block, and so you hire someone from the next block to
oversee things on your block. You pay
him the same as what you make, and your pay immediately shrinks to $45,000 a
year. That’s $5,000 in taxes per person
to pay for your new government.
Add up all the taxes you pay, federal, state, property,
sales, Social Security, Medicare, utility, excise, and you might well end up
paying half your income in taxes. Democrats
are on a mission to increase government spending. They don’t feel they are doing their job if
they don’t constantly find more things to spend money on. Then every few years they will try to raise
taxes, because the debt is so high. We
already pay about a half trillion dollars a year in interest alone on our
federal debt. That’s money that just
wasted. Like burning it.
Democrats also like to have a lot of people receiving government
assistance. They feel like they are
helping people. If it was for a little
while to help somebody get through a rough time, that would be one thing. But they really don’t care if a person ever
gets off government assistance. They
would probably be happiest if every person got a check from the government for
something, unless, of course, you are very rich, in which case they feel they
have the right to tell you how much or how little of your money you get to keep
for yourself.
I believe the single most important thing we can do to give
us the best possible economy is to bring the jobs back to America.
We used to make all of our stuff here. Good paying full time jobs with medical
insurance were standard in our country. Middle
class families were raising large families on one income, and as the population
increased, so would the demand, and so would the jobs.
Then in the 1990s, free trade became all the rage, and companies
left our country like mice running out of sight when you turn on the
lights. You can always make something
cheaper somewhere else in the world, so free trade sent millions of our jobs to
other countries. It’s hard to find
anything made in America anymore, and most jobs here now don’t pay enough to
support a family by themselves.
Our government leaders, I’m told, are trying to get other
countries to buy more of our goods, so that our export industry can provide jobs
for our workers. I think that’s good,
but not good policy. Trying to build
an economy on exports means that we are hoping that all the other countries prosper
first so they can buy our products so that we can prosper. We are tying the success of our economy on
others having success first. That’s just
dumb.
We used to tax all imports to our country. Taxes on imports used to pay for almost our
entire federal budget. We didn’t even
have an income tax until 1913, and that was only meant for the very rich, and
it was only a small amount.
Now when everything is made outside of our country and the
wages for the jobs left in our country are dismal, yes, taxing imports raises
the cost of a lot of products, and people are encouraged to complain about this.
But we have to bring the jobs back here. More people will be working at better paying
jobs with better benefits, like employer based medical insurance.
But, but but . . .
then other countries will tax our imports to their countries, as if they
aren’t doing that already.
When Toyota first came into the American market, they were
taxed, and they cost more than similar American cars. And they wore that like a badge of
honor. They wouldn’t negotiate prices,
and Americans flocked to buy them, because they saw themselves as getting something
special.
Foreign products were always available in our country, and
they were always more expensive, and nobody cared, because they were, well,
foreign products. But they were true
foreign products, like French wine, and Swiss chocolate. They weren’t American goods made somewhere else
and then shipped back here.
Democrats always talk about how they are for the American workers,
but they never talk about bringing the jobs back. They are content to have half the country on
government assistance programs, so they are seen as the compassionate
ones. They would rather people be
dependent on the government than independent, self-reliant, and prosperous.
When people don’t have jobs, not only does the government
lose their tax revenues, but it also ends up paying people for not working. We lose twice. And so, when people have good jobs, they pay
taxes on their incomes, and everybody else doesn’t have to support them.
I should add too that after the jobs left our country, the
government got short on money, so they increased taxes on the companies that
were still here, and that caused a lot of other companies to leave the
country. Republicans lowered corporate
taxes last year that removed some of the incentive for companies to leave our
country, but the country is divided over the issue of taxing imports.
As the country is divided, it makes it harder for businesses
to know what to do, because they don’t want to invest a lot of money moving their
operations and then find everything going back the way it was in a few years.
But the jobs left as we stopped taxing imports, and I don’t
see another way to bring them back without taxing them again. We should tax them all and probably at the
same rate. Exceptions could be made in
special cases. Not sure yet what those
would be.
Yes, there will be some pain and adjustment for a while,
because some prices will go up before the jobs come back, but when you have
half a dozen appliance manufacturers making the same thing, prices will go down
again with the competition.
Many of our politicians have given up the idea of bringing
the jobs back. They say it can’t be
done. I don’t believe that. And why in the world would we not even
try? When people are working at good
paying jobs, they feel good about themselves, and the government won’t have to
borrow billions of dollars from other countries just to pay its bills.
