LET'S TALK ABOUT "YOUR" JOBS

Jobs .. and the economy. Those seem to be the issues that are driving many, if not most, of those who are supporting the Kerry candidacy.

First of all ... I'm going to repeat this simply because it makes the whiners so unbelievably angry. Listen up. They're not your jobs! The jobs belong to the employers .. not to you! You have job skills and, presumably, a willingness to work. Your task in a free economy is to get out there and find some employer with a job who needs your skills ... and strike a deal.

If you do not have the particular set of job skills that an employer needs, of if you have priced your labor out of the marketplace, guess what? It's not the employer's fault. The fault lies with you. Either develop a new set of job skills that are actually in demand, or adjust your pricing. The employer knows what he's looking for you. If you're not it .. it's your problem, not his.

Now ... you say you're going to vote for a Democrat this year because of jobs? You mean to tell me that you're going to vote against George Bush this year because you don't have a set of job skills that are in demand in our free marketplace? Yeah .. that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Tell me. Just what do you want the president to do? You information technology people out there .. just what are you demanding? Do you want companies to stop outsourcing IT jobs to India? OK ... tell me how to do that. These companies aren't shipping parts overseas and completed products back. All they do is ship information overseas by phone lines or the Internet. Then that information is modified and shipped back the same way. What do you want the government .. the president to do? Do you want some federal law that prohibits companies from transmitting information overseas by the Internet, having that information transformed or modified, and then shipped back? And tell me just how do you enforce that law? Does that law then apply to you also if you seek information from a company that is located overseas, thus depriving a domestic company of your business?

Ditto for manufacturing. I've already told you the story about the California company that makes computer mouses. (computer mice?) This company ships the components to China. The mouse is assembled in China and shipped back, then sold for around $40. Why? Because the assembly is cheaper in China than it would be in the US. So, you say you want the president to force this company to have that mouse assembled in the US? Fine .. then the price for the mouse goes up to about $70 a pop and sales drop. As the sales drop the jobs of the people in this country who manufacture the components for that mouse go away. Then the 100 marketing jobs this company supports in California also go away. You see, perhaps you can succeed in forcing this company to assemble these mouses in the US, but there just isn't any way you can force the American consumer to pay 80% more for the "made in America" version.

As Bruce Bartlett says in an article listed in my reading assignments, "No nation has ever gotten rich by forcing its citizens to pay more for domestic goods and services that could have been procured more cheaply abroad."

What we are seeing here is a demonstration of the "government owes me" mentality of far too many Americans. Every time you arrive at a speed bump in your life's journey you start screaming to the government for help. Sure, the speed bump is going to slow you down a bit ... but just keep moving forward and things inevitably pick up speed again. Americans are becoming helpless whiners. The more helpless you are, and the more you whine, the more likely it is you're going to vote for a Democrat. Democrats specialize in stroking the malcontent.

Congratulations, whiners. At a time when America if fighting World War IV, the war against Islamic terrorism ... you're going to vote for a candidate who wants to treat terrorism as a freaking law enforcement problem because you've made some pitiful jobs choices. Pitiful.

That's the bottom line, isn't it? The more we outsource; the more we depend on Communist China; the more we allow illegal immigrants into the country to take American jobs - the more vulnerable we ultimately make ourselves to foreign invasion.

It is the major national security issue we face. Bush and the Republicans better show some leadership on it or they're going to have their a$$es handed to them by Kerry and the Rats.

Nations can use trade as a weapon every bit as much as they can guns and bayonets and missiles and bombers. The founders realized this, and as a result they gave Congress, as the elected representatives of the people, the power to oversee and formulate trade policy. They realized the awesome power the marketplace holds, and foresaw the dangers that nations driven by an agenda that is not in our interest could present if the market were used against us.

Placing the fate of our nation in the hands of outsiders is not a prescription for national security. There will be a price to pay if we do that, and it is a price so high that it can never be reflected in any price paid, or commodity bought and sold in the marketplace.

I would love to see any so-called reporter, when a politician promises to create jobs, ask, "Really, [sir/ma'am], can we see the job postings for these new jobs you will create?"

The best a politician can do is create an environment for the public sector to create jobs.

I work for a large company and, while we are growing, the largest growth is among our subcontractors (the majority of which are small businesses). The tax cut created this in my opinion. It is allowing these small businesses to flourish.

A lot of the older ones of us are forming their own small businesses because the big companies, like mine, can't move fast enough to react to the changes and needs of our customers. This is being driven in my company because the people who control the IRAD funds haven't got a clue about our customer's needs (my sour grapes). I'll probably leave soon and be out of work till I find my niche.

Thanks for the pings.

I believe there are three basic reasons we are losing our design and manufacturing jobs to other countries:

(1) Americans have decided that we are absolute masters at planning, scheduling, shuffling, collating, and organizing. That’s why our colleges and universities are over-run with communication arts, journalism, travel and tourism, and business administration majors. The number of mechanical/civil/chemical/electrical/nuclear engineering, math, physics, and chemistry majors is a small percentage of what it was fifty years ago. And a large number of those who are sitting in those classes are non-Americans anyway. The number of young people attending vo-tech schools is also dropping, as are the number of apprentices in hands-on building and repair jobs. When it comes to designing, hammering, welding, drilling, forging, we’ve decided to leave that peon handwork to the lesser developed countries. We had our fill of that back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Let the rest of the world get their hands dirty now. We’re above that. We’ve evolved to a higher plane that involves more cerebral pursuits.

(2) Our high standard of living, and the stranglehold that unions and socialist-oriented special interest groups have had on this country for decades, has caused our average hourly wages and benefits to far exceed reasonableness.

(3) The federal/state/local tax burdens that have been placed on American companies have contributed to the high cost of operating a business to the point where a significant portion of the cost of a finished product is money that has been extorted for payment to the government, simply for the privilege of doing business in America (a privilege to which many companies are now saying ‘Thanks, but no thanks’).

As I have already said too many times here, an industrialized society cannot continue to long exist – coincidental with liberty -- when it exports to other countries the design and manufacturing jobs for those nuts and bolts tangibles that it will one day rely upon for its very survival (and the double-edge swords lies in exporting them especially to other countries which are its political and ideological adversaries). It’s not only the jobs we are losing. It’s the physical source parts needed for our existence. To heat and cool our homes and businesses. To move ourselves and our lives’ necessities from one place to another. To build and maintain our infrastructure. To grow, harvest and preserve our food. To purify our water. To have access to the air, sea and land equipment and weaponry necessary to defend our shores. And to possess the wherewithal to repair and maintain all of the above.

If and when the madmen of the world believe they have the upper hand, a nation whose people are masters at scheduling, planning, paper shuffling, organizing, and collating, and who can’t design or manufacture their way out of a paper bag, isn’t going to keep those madmen at bay. It’s not only a serious matter of economics. It’s a matter of survival.

Yet, I strongly suspect that soon-to-be democrat presidential nominee Kerry is going to be running on an It’s the economy, stupid! theme, just as his equally disingenuous democrat predecessor (and his equally disingenuous democrat predecessor) did.

Anyone who believes that the three reasons listed above are indeed responsible for our loss of the jobs needed to maintain our strength and prosperity needs to ask himself, ‘Which ideology (socialist/democrat or less-government/conservative) was most responsible for the evolution of those three conditions?'

I also strongly suspect that candidate Kerry’s solution for our jobs/manufacturing losses will be more of the same programs/philosophies which caused the problems listed above: the continuation of the special interest/union strangleholds, the socialist/anti-capitalist disdain for the profit motive, and the knowledge that government can line its coffers, instill dependence on government, and redistribute wealth, by taxing the makers and producers.

So when the Kerry/Edwards ticket focuses most of its rhetoric on the economy, it will be in order to play on the guaranteed ignorance of the voting public. Because any American who isn’t aware that it has been the democrats' (same old, same old) policies that got us into this mess to begin with will no doubt fall for their empty promises yet again. And we’ll dig ourselves even deeper into the economic/national security hole. (What was it that we used to say as children? If we dug deep enough, we’d eventually reach China? ... Were we prophetic or what?)

~ joanie

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