The first thing that has to be addressed is to stop MORE people from joining the labor pool - ie, immigrants.
We need to create 125,000 to 150,000 jobs per month, every month, to keep up with labor force growth due to immigration. When we’re in a situation as we are now, that’s got to be the first thing we address: quit making the employment problem bigger. This is right out of the lesson of life #1: “When you realize you’re in a hole, stop digging.”
This, BTW, echoes what happened during the last debt deflation in the US (ie, the Depression). Immigration controls became rather tight by the end of the 30’s because we could not create enough jobs for the people already here. Today, the situation is only worse. Much worse.
I would include H1B visa limits in the immigration issue. If US grads went through the trouble of getting a technical degree, then US business can pay their wages instead of employing H1B applicants. I’ve worked in SIlly Valley and I know for a fact that the H1B visas are the biggest scam going. Employers love H1B employees because they’re effectively indentured servants.
For those who want to complain about the higher cost of labor, I have this retort: We settled the issue of cheap labor in the US in April, 1965.
The Germans pay their employees rather handsomely, and yet they’re able to export their way to a trade surplus. How is that? I’d also NB that the German political class is now taking on their own immigration issue in a way that would cause NPR commentators here to lose bladder control if we said the same things here.
Next issue is to take on China over the peg. Either they can drop the peg, or we start raising tariffs. We’ve talked enough about this for years. Policy makers worry they won’t buy our debt. Well, if we slash spending, we don’t need to worry about the PRC buying our paper. The current “beggar thy neighbor” approach to trade by competitive currency devaluation isn’t going to solve the problem. Time to quit mouthing these idiotic “free trade” mantras and deal with the problem head-on.
Last big issue: We need to restore confidence in US financial markets.
The Fed needs to be audited, out in the open, for real. The Fed unquestionably was at the root of the housing bubble, making money far too easily available at far too low a cost. Right now, they’re deliberately devaluing the US dollar in a tactic that hasn’t worked for the first $2T they’ve done, and now they’re talking over another trillion that they might use for QE. Not once in this mess have they exercise prudent regulatory oversight, they bailed out AIG without any authority to do so, effectively committing the US taxpayer without any vote in Congress. Heads need to roll here too.
Then we need to take on Wall Street, head-on. There is rampant fraud and theft happening in the open on Wall Street, and yet the perps are allowed to pay a fine and walk away scot-free. Goldman paid $550mil - but that reduces their alpha only a tad for one quarter. The SEC just let Mozilo off with a $65 mil fine for what were clearly criminal securities fraud, wire fraud, etc actions. Yet he still gets to walk with over $100 mil of ill-gotten profits from the sale of his stock and ownership interest in Countrywide. No one from Lehman has been charged yet, and there’s ample evidence of criminal actions coming out of post-mortem exams of their books.
The financial system will not reform unless and until a whole boatload of these clowns are perp-walked out of their offices and into a court, charged with felony indictments and then tried, sentenced and stripped of their ill-gotten gains. There’s abundant evidence now of criminal action in the entire housing bubble mess, and yet the government continues to look the other way, allowing these clowns to rip off investors.
Those are the high spots of what would be my agenda in office.
1. Repeal Obamacare.
2. Allow repatriation of overseas profits by U.S. corporations at a much lower rate than the full U.S. corporate income tax rate.
3. Permanently lower the U.S. corporate income tax rate, and tax overseas profit at a rate net of any foreign tax rates already paid.
You have my vote.