Where Have All the Jobs Gone?

This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions. Now, on to the subject of the week:

Mostly to China.

That is the answer to the question posed in the title of this week’s column. China has consumed a major portion of all of the industries which once flourished in America and made our nation great. They also took our jobs.

We are left with empty or converted factory buildings, a sagging economy punctuated with huge unemployment statistics, foreclosed homes, failing businesses, unfunded government programs, and a growing segment of the population living in poverty. Meanwhile things are booming in China with entire huge cities being built at an unbelievable pace, new factories filling buildings as quickly as they can be built, and a fast growing middle class emerging out of poverty into prosperity.

How did this happen?

It was allowed to occur because of our bad management, stupidity, and greed.

In my opinion, those were the characteristics which were demonstrated by our leaders over the past five decades. It all cumulated during the Clinton era when the “elite leadership” endorsed the concept of a global economy and free trade among nations. It might have sounded good on the surface, but it also sounded the death knell for American industrial production. Passage of this legislation is a perfect example of how the system often works. Congress enacts a body of laws and it then takes a decade of so before the public can realize the full impact of what was passed. By then, the guilty politicians are no longer in office...and everyone has forgotten who really is to blame.

It will be the same story for the Health Care Bill and Cap and Trade if it is passed. At the state level, the Land Use Comprehensive Plans will eventually become a real issue for property owners years from now.

In order to accomplish the ruination of our once booming and dominant role as an industrialized society, our leaders took the following steps to create an industrial environment which could not compete on a global scale:

● Tax industries at the highest tax rate in the world.

● Pass laws which encourage unionization of industries. This leads to unreasonably high labor costs, generous retirement programs, luxurious health benefits, plentiful vacations and holidays, and plant rules which prohibit full utilization of productivity enhancing equipment and procedures. These elements are enabled by politicians purchased with union funds and collective voting power.

● Increase government regulation of all industries and place expensive administrative costs on businesses in order to comply.

● Place ever tightening environmental and social responsibilities on industry.

● Once this ‘High Cost” production environment has been created, suddenly adopt a policy of “free trade”, remove all protective tariffs and quotas, and allow full access to America’s markets for goods made in China, where their industries enjoy low labor costs, high productivity, little government internal regulation, very low taxes, and government subsidies to encourage exportation.

American industries quickly found that goods made in their U.S. plants had such a high total production cost that the Chinese made goods were 40-50% less expensive on the shelves of American retail stores…even after the Chinese goods have been transported half way around the globe.

Then we wait ten to fifteen years as American industries either closed their domestic plants and transitioned into sourcing arrangements from Chinese makers….or went out of business. In the process, millions and millions of jobs were transferred out of the United States to those shiny new Chinese factories.

Just as each payroll dollar is multiplied by five or six in its total impact on the local economy when a plant opens, the reverse is true when those dollars are lost. The negative impact is similarly multiplied as retailers, suppliers, and other infrastructure components to industries also fail.

That is where we are as a nation. The government imposed economic policies of the last fifty years combined with the foolish trade deals made in the 1990’s, have changed our world for the worse….In fact, they destroyed the backbone of our economy.

Those jobs will never come back….no matter how much “stimulus” we try to give industry. As a nation, we are most likely facing a future of continuing decline in our standard of living and a diminished ability to support those in need within our society.

Some restoration might be possible if we instituted new rules of trade which began to somewhat “level the playing field” for American made products. We should not be totally focused on exporting, and should attempt to once again make American made products attractive on a cost basis to the American consumer.

This would involve reinstalling some selective tariffs, using subsidies to help American made products compete, and use of aggressive programs to assist in the rebuilding of factories and industries.

We should remember that wealth is only created when we add labor and functional capability to raw materials which add to its value to an end user. Companies which produce durable and consumable goods create wealth. Wealth creating jobs include mining, farming, construction and manufacturing.

This newly created wealth is then shared with governments at all levels which then consume this wealth to provide infrastructure and services to societies. Service functions such as doctors, lawyers, retailers, media, retailers, banks, and others simply redistribute wealth…they do not create it.

Schools and federal, state, and local governments are the major consumers of wealth.

When the wealth creating elements of this formula are removed or decreased, the cycle of wealth begins to fail. When our leaders foolishly traded away the wealth creating industries which once produced items across almost every town in America, they began a negative cycle which may now be uncorrectable.

We need to elect new leadership which understands the mechanics of what has transpired, and who will dedicate themselves into restoring wealth creation within our economic system. We need leaders who can “Get it Right”. This November is the time to start.

Rudiments: Odds and Ends Worth Mentioning-

● The Tea Party Message, plain and simple:

♦ Quit Taxing!

♦ Quit Borrowing!

♦ Quit Printing!

♦ Quit Spending!

♦ Reduce Government and give us our Constitutional personal and property rights back!

Your Tax Dollars At Work!

The following was posted on the internet by NY Conservative on 9/15 from an article in Cybercast News Service in a feature written by Matt Cover:

“The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/75198

● “If America dies…it will be a suicide, death by dry rot from the inside. We dare not let that happen. It is time to be involved.”

~ Dr. Tom Kitchen, Baptist Bible College of Florida

Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Hatcher Publications.