Tag: jobs

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

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In a very real sense, the world that anyone of us who’s over fifty grew up in no longer exists except as a memory and a reference point by which to reckon the current acceleration of change.  Things like newspapers, television advertising, most brick-and-mortar stores and even paper money effectively don’t exist anymore.  The whole of life in the most prosperous nation on the planet has been upended in such a way that it has disrupted every facet of life.  Young people aren’t getting well-paying jobs in the numbers needed to sustain institutions like marriage, parenthood and homeownership.

The truth is the tech revolution threatens to destroy the way of life in this country by eliminating the need for a good chunk of the jobs formerly filled by the American middle-class.  This is a crisis that is orders of magnitude greater than when the industrial revolution introduced mechanical power to replace horses, typewriters replaced scribes and oil displaced wood and coal as fuels.  There are millions of people who grew up in middle-class families who live in their parents’ basements, and can’t make enough money to move out, and have no prospects of having families of their own.  Think about that.

Donald Trump wants to make America great again.  The only way that can happen is to figure out how to provide gainful employment for the majority of Americans.  This country only became powerful because the majority of its citizens existed above the poverty line.  If that ceases to be the case we will see a revolution here.

Trump’s solution is to reshore manufacturing jobs that had been sent to Asia.  There are a lot of questions associated with that idea.  How quickly can it be done?  How many jobs will there be.  How well will they pay?  Of course I don’t claim to have all the answers.  In fact, no one does.  But I have the sense that he’s on the right track.  Manufacturing has been an enormous engine for bringing places like China, Vietnam and India out of the depths of poverty and into at least the “second world.”  All that is really necessary is for U.S. industrial policy to include sufficient positive and negative incentives for American companies (and German and Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean) to move their manufacturing operations back here.

In a real sense this is an inflection point for this country.  We won’t stay where we currently are.  The old economy and those who worked in it are going away.  Either we replace what’s here with a restored industrial landscape or we allow the future to be stolen from our children and grandchildren and watch America turn into a feudal state with haves and have-nots sharply separated into a small aristocracy and a large but shrinking underclass of underemployed surplus human beings.

I’m betting Trump can do it.  He’s broken the hold on things that the Deep State previously had and he’s getting things done.  If he can avoid being assassinated in the next three and a half years, he has the potential to save this wonderful place.

Will America Get Another Chance?

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The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.  The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America ran the world politically and economically.  The captains of industry were in a position to expand their businesses on a scale never before seen.  American companies dominated the global market in just about every major category of manufacturing.  That expansion employed two generations of Americans in a way that hadn’t been seen before.  Americans came to believe that each generation would be richer and happier than the one before.  Everyone would have a nice home.  Everyone’s kids would go to college.  Everyone would prosper.

Now the 1970s was the first wake-up call.  With an energy crisis and a financial crisis and the first big recession in twenty-five years Americans were worried and confused.  But along came Ronald Reagan and the wonders of deregulation and before you know it “Greed is good” and the good times are rolling again.

But what nobody noticed, or at least no one in the big cities noticed was that corporate America had decided that employing Americans was too expensive and unnecessary.  So slowly but surely, they moved their manufacturing operations off-shore.  They went to Mexico and the Philippines.  They went to Japan, South Korea, China, then Thailand, Vietnam and finally Myanmar.  Anywhere except here.  So, thirty years later the rust belt now looks like a third world nation.  Towns and cities are filled with houses that haven’t been painted in decades.  Main streets are full of abandoned and dilapidated commercial and industrial properties.  In fact, the towns are now empty of young people.  Only the old people are hanging on, living off their social security and the dregs of their savings.

In the big coastal cities, there were still white-collar jobs to be had running these nominally American corporations.  And tech companies provided high paying jobs for IT professionals.  But in the last ten years even these jobs are more and more being off-shored.  The hollowing out of the American work force is almost complete.  There are still jobs at hospitals and government agencies that are tasked with servicing the needs of the human flotsam and jetsam that are still clinging to life in the battered US economy.  There have to be jobs for Democrat voters after all.

So, the second generation after the WWII generation, the Millennials were the first generation to discover that they would be worse off than their parents.  And the next generation after that is acutely aware how bad things are out there.  None of that post war optimism exists.  But what lingers is the sense that Americans have been double crossed.  They’ve been sold out by corporate America but more correctly, they been sold out by the federal government that allowed these corporations to abandon their countrymen to joblessness and poverty.  They allowed the states that they supposedly represented to be picked clean of factories and warehouses and retail businesses.  They were paid off to ignore the dismantling of the industrial base of the United States of America.

Well, it’s already done.  No one will be going to jail for it.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton got their cut.  Obama did too.  And George W. Bush sent all those unemployed Midwesterners to Iraq to be blown up by maniacs with road-side IEDs.  That’s ancient history now.

But that sense of being double crossed still lingers among the dispossessed but still living victims.  I guess the only question is will there be any kind of attempt to save what’s left of America’s people?  Donald Trump did something.  He called out the outrageous trade deals that his predecessors inflicted on us.  He boosted energy production and even did something to try and get some jobs brought back here.  So of course, they unleashed COVID and the BLM riots to crash the economy.  Then Dementia Joe applied the coup de grâce.  He shut down the energy industries and unleashed hyperinflation.

Assume that Americans successfully pry the federal elective offices of President and Congress away from the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.  Will the Republicans follow the lead of Trump or his successor to try and force corporate America to reinvest in this country?  Sure, they’ll be busy trying to clean out the Deep State (if they’re interested in anything more than business as usual) but just as important is fixing the economy.  And the only way to do that is to return all those manufacturing jobs.  But will they do it?  If they don’t there won’t be a generation after the one growing up now.  That’s simple arithmetic.  No jobs, no families.

August 21st 2016 Election Status Report

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The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Presidential Poll is a rolling poll that is updated daily. It’s based on a 3,000 eligible voters. Today Donald Trump is ahead of Hillary Clinton 45% to 43%. What does this mean? Well, actually who knows. What it means to me is that a non-republican polling group has Trump ahead. To me that makes it credible. It doesn’t mean he’s definitely winning. But it does mean that those ridiculous polls by every left wing pollster imaginable showing Hillary ahead by 10% or 15% or even 20 % are a bunch of crap.

And that’s important. It means the drive by media will attempt another hit piece about Trump eating baby unicorns. It also means that Louisiana and the other bad news for democrats stories have had some traction. Labor Day is getting close and it’s time for the campaigns to switch into high gear. Expect endless political commercials and endless democrat outrage at anything Trump says. Well, it’s time for him to up his game. And based on the last week’s worth of speeches (in Milwaukee and Louisiana) I think he might be ready.

Hopefully Trump’s folks are ready to start spending money on advertising. I just hope they use it to go for the throat. Playing it safe isn’t what got him this far and it isn’t what he needs to pull ahead. The appeal to black voters was smart and also innovative. It speaks to the fundamental weakness of the democrat coalition. A few more jabs like that would put a good scare into the dems and might even get some votes from unexpected quarters.

I think focusing on the Millennials would be a very smart move. They are the primary recipients of the Obama economic meltdown. The Bernie voters are still out there and ripe for the picking. Another good move might be focusing on some cultural factors. Playing up the political correctness aspects of progressive organizations and groups and how they restrict the freedom of everyday people would seem to be fertile ground for campaigning.

Finally I think pointing up the most obnoxious qualities and policies of Obama (IRS attacks, executive orders putting coal miners out of work) is a political winner. So prepare for the two-fold narrative push:

1) Hillary is already a “lock.”

2) Have you heard the latest Trump gaffe?

That’s what the Trump campaign needs to push back on. Hopefully they’ve put together a good strategy. If there are going to be debates I expect that will be Hillary’s weakest link. She’s not very good off the cuff. The only thing he has to be careful about is looking to mean to the old bag.

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Independence Day – A Few Thoughts

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So I’m an American. Great grandson of immigrants. Close enough to the boat to know what it is like to be one of the newbies but around long enough to feel a pride in belonging to something exceptional.

I was brought up on the notion that living here was as close to being in heaven as you could get without having to die. And in a lot of ways it lived up to the hype. The streets weren’t paved with gold. But they were paved. No one starved. And that even went for the “poor.” Even the marginally working class had enough to feed a family. Everyone could read and write and if you weren’t a hopeless sociopath chances were you could hold down some kind of job and support yourself. Most folks attended a church and dragged the kids along to help “steer them in the right direction.”

The general notion was that America was a machine that took well-intentioned people who followed the rules and worked hard and from them generated wealth and happiness for everyone.

But sometimes the machine ran off the rails. The two big hiccups that I grew up with were the 1930’s and the late 1970’s. Each of these events damaged the morale of the nation and brought into question the stability of our way of life. No one knows how the world would have turned out if the Second World War hadn’t “saved” us from the Depression but what is important is that by the twentieth century Americans believed that not only could the US government avoid recessions but if it didn’t it would be held responsible. Herbert Hoover was vilified as the epitome of a callous plutocrat. And Jimmy Carter was cast out as a loser who had allowed the American industrial engine to stall out into stagflation.

Coming up to the present, George W. Bush was blamed for the Crash of 2008. In an eight year period that in many ways resembled the ’30s, Obama seemed to mostly get a pass for not reviving the American economy. This is reminiscent of the treatment FDR received. Apparently if you can vilify your predecessor successfully enough you can avoid blame (if you’re a democrat).

So what have we learned? Americans expect results. Especially from republicans. Apparently people don’t expect democrats to make the economy work. They will settle for handouts. But republicans have to deliver. The logic must be, “you people are always talking about free enterprise, well, put up or shut up.”

So here’s the whole thing in a nutshell. If you want to be a republican president coming in under a bad economy and you want to be re-elected, you not only have to revive the economy but you also have to do it in your first two years. Otherwise you’ll lose the Congress and be hamstrung by the democrats.

Unless of course you can buy off the people with free stuff (a la the democrats) and/or distract them with some bigger problem. Trump is betting that immigration is that bigger problem. And he may be right. If he actually accomplishes a good chunk of his deportation idea, he may get some extra time to revive the economy.

All right, this whole convoluted essay is basically trying to confirm something that is becoming harder for even the purest free trade advocate to ignore. The American People are fine with business making lots of money, as long as they are part of that equation. If American companies move all their plants and their jobs offshore then they’re not American companies. And they should not be treated as such. And if a foreign company builds a plant in the US and employs Americans then they should be rewarded any way we can. It’s not all that complicated. Americans with jobs don’t turn into a mob. So get them jobs, now!

Whoever gets into office next better get results and fast. Or else there are gonna be fireworks.

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