In related "sucking sound" noises, US unemployment just dropped to 4.5%.
People have jobs again. They're just making much less than what they were previously making. They're having to live with two or three weeks vacation when they had previously worked their way up to four or five weeks vacation. They're looking at a retirement with some paltry pension instead of the comfortable pension that they could have had if they'd been able to continue their previous jobs.
Bad things are bound to happen in the economy occasionally, and we can't stop every bad thing from happening. However, we can admit that these kinds of big losses in the salaries and benefits that average Americans earn is a bad thing and not a good thing. A candidate who thinks that workers losing their jobs and having to take other jobs at lower salaries with lower benefits is a candidate who is much less likely to receive my vote.
For the workers to be taking these kinds of cuts in salary and benefits while top executives and the drones who shuffle papers for the top executives enjoy record high compensation is also wrong. Again, maybe the government can't do anything about the situation without causing greater harm, but I don't trust anyone who thinks that it's great for workers to be taking losses while top executives receive tens of millions of dollars to quit the company after doing a poor job. People who are receiving these record compensation packages should not be asking government to make any kind of changes in policy just to let them dump American workers for someone a little cheaper overseas or someone who has been working a little cheaper because he's in the country illegally.
Finally, when we trade a machinist's job for a telemarketing job, we are making our country a little less secure. We can thrive very well as a nation without any telemarketers. If necessary, we can maintain a war effort without a single telemarketer in the entire country. We cannot sustain a war effort if we don't have plenty of machinists to make the things needed by a nation at war.
Bill