That’s a lot of tickets to China, isn’t it?
Cut taxes and regulation to spur job creation at the same time we start whittling away at the entitlements for those least in need.
The poor, at least those on welfare, should be all sent to China. That is where the work is.
Dang near every business in Bismarck has help wanted signs out front. McDonalds has signs offering $10 hour starting wage with raises and a $500 hiring bonus. Walmart electronics at any time is impossible to find someone to help you and at the holidays it was stupid, one employee for 70 customers. They are actively hiring but there are just not enough people to work. The last 3 times I have gone to Taco Bell (over a 3 month time period) the first time they had the store closed because they didn’t have enough people to cover a shift, the second and third time the drive thru was closed because there just were not enough people to work it.
Bringing people here to work would be great for the customers, but there are so few places for them to live. Housing is at a shortage, and what is there is expensive. We live 65 miles away and people are moving in that work 80-120 miles away in the oil area. Housing in our little town is almost gone and the property values are rising. We bought our house 5 years ago for 16k and it has doubled in the last year.
If you were to bring employees here to work the lower paying jobs they will try to go to the oil patch where there are higher paying jobs. Some people are living in campers. Weather guys are saying -60 wind chill for Sunday and Monday, they are going to be cold cold cold.
Why don’t we simply help the jobs move to where the poor are? Yes, that would mean ending Progressivism and its corrosive effect on urban economies.
“Population might fall in some already-depressed areas, but, for those left behind, schools and public services will be less crowded, and less competition will exist for job openings.”
This never translates into downsizing of government/reduced costs; it simply means the area becomes a “sanctuary” for illegals (to keep the housing and classrooms full). In my area this has led the jobs and mobile workers to flee, accelerating the death spiral.
If there was any lesson people learned since 2000, it is that owning a home/mortgage is a risky proposition because it ties you to a municipal government that will fiscally rape you to fund local government workers (teachers, cops, etc.); those policies kill jobs, and you are unable to flee. As fewer taxpayers breed, there is no need to buy residential property except to earn income (which has its own risks); young people today are keeping their options open by avoiding families and buying homes. Municipalities don’t like this concept (as they lose their captive taxpayers), but they have only themselves to blame.
One reasonable plan was that America has a huge number of abandoned small towns, that with some planning could be revitalized as “lower tech” support centers for things like retirement towns, long term care and hospices.
The biggest expenses would be to rebuild buildings, many of which were insulated with asbestos, and the underlying infrastructure, such as water, sewers, and electrical.
Set up to a great extent by the states, it would take care of several problems. Most of the work and small business would be done by the “quality” unemployed, and beyond what is needed for the town, other development would be discouraged. Prices kept artificially low, with a conscious effort to reproduce a local economy of the type that existed in the late 1940’s and ‘50’s.
This is just a bare bones description, but the idea is to provide for the elderly and the poor a “step back” from modern society, with a slower pace, less stress, and a comfortable place to live.
Stalin,Hitler,Pol-Pot and Mao had this idea first.
Help them? What ever happened to walking?
I’ve moved several times for work, the latest I relocated to Grande Prairie, AB this last early spring. I moved for opportunities and to provide for my family and avoid the rut. Everyone wants to live in big cities with all the amenities. Then they barely scrape by or don’t, always complaining they don’t make enough.
Yet where I am, we can’t find enough people, yet we still have an airport, all the restaurants, costcos, the walmarts and all that crap.
It astounds me that people won’t move a couple hours to make big bucks.
It is easier to keep doing what you are doing than to change. Whether it is physically moving, giving up an addiction, etc.
I am just saying it is easier, not the right thing.
The corollary to that is we only change, when we have to.
the most basic and straightforward type of support that government can offer is direct incentives to encourage the poor and unemployed to relocate.
This is an important article, bookmark it or save it.
This is Agenda 21.
Take names and Google them.
Raj Chetty, Ed Glaeser and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard University
Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley
Eli Lehrer and Lori Sanders the authors
What they said is that every effort that the states or the federal government has tried to eliminate poverty has failed and that we should federalize their program by providing a guaranteed income and eliminating the tax credits that entice people to buy their own homes.
In my city of Los Angeles they have installed dedicated bus lines that purposely interfere with traffic. The thought behind this is that people will be forced to move into the cities subsidized high-rise apartments or condos built on fault lines to get around. One third of those people living in their high rise apartments will be the poor because White flight didn’t work. They are installing economic zones along those transportation corridors so that the people living in condos on the transportation corridor can get to their jobs on the transportation corridors.
They have taken lanes out of our streets and made mini parks and they have made rickshaws legal. The city is renting bicycles and have plans for renting golf carts to get around.
Jerry Brown from 1995
http://biggovernment.com/mrichmond/2010/06/10/jerry-brown-flashback-we-need-more-welfare-and-fewer-jobs/
The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs. Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I’m talking about welfare for all. Without it, you’re going to have warfare for all. Without a universal health care like every other civilized country, without a minimum level of income, this country will explode. You can’t blame the guy at the bottom forever. At some point there’s a reaction and we’ll see that the real criminals are those calling the tune, making the rules, and walking to the bank. We have the money, we have the brain power. The United States now has the highest measured wealth of any nation ever in the history of the world. We could rebuild our cities, we could create the kind of buying power and community well-being that will provide for peace. The guaranteed income is one way.
Another way is to have always the availability of work in a nonprofit, in community service. A third is to start giving people training to develop skills where they can be self-supporting. You could come up with a cash supplement. Even conservatives have suggested a negative income tax to cut out the bureaucracy. If we were smart, we’d get rid of welfare and give people a family assistance like they do in Europe…
The problem isn’t even a problem. Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we’re all in it together. It’ll work when there’s a shared sense of destiny. It can be done! It’s all there! What isn’t there is the leadership to create the kind of social network, the safety net, the distribution that would truly create a just and equal society…
We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let’s-take-care-of-one-another. That’s the creative challenge. First, expose relentlessly the big lie that comes over the tube every night-that if you just go out and find that job, and work harder, it’ll all be fine. It won’t! There’s not enough work to go around and a lot of the pay is not fair. Unless you totally yank up that system and create a better one, unless the spirit changes, unless the heart opens, unless we confront power with the truth of our own unarmed but absolute fearless truth, we’re not going to overcome it. Evil is too embedded to be overcome by anything other than a spiritual challenge.
More Nanny State-ism?
Somewhere down the line people have to make an effort to help themselves.
The ficticious Tom Joad didn’t have a government grant to travel 1,000 miles seeking work for his family.
And neither did the millions and millions of Pre-Nanny State real Americans who did (and still do) whatever is necessary to find work and support themselves.
Remember that King Obama told us everyone had to have “skin in the game”?
The problem is that liberals want your skin in the game to bail out their pals and chosen people.
I’m sorry but I could only read as far as the housing and missed the welfare and after.
What I read was massive federal spending up to this point with zero or negative results.
What I also read was even more and more federal spending and involvement.
When will the government realize when you give freebees all the way. Why would these folks do anything to get up off their butt when they know you will take care of them.
I’d like to think we could get back to that utopia world where there was little, very little federal government, absolutely zero freebees and the opportunity to move growing areas of your own free will like the Irish, Italians, Eastern Euroes and the blacks did in the early 1900s when they saw opportunity up north.
Assistance programs should require the able bodied to be willing to move to places where employment is available.
Have you driven thru a 'poor' neighborhood lately?
There are PLENTY of 'jobs' that need done there!
The streets SHOULD be the cleanest and the alleys should be spotless!
No weeds or trash anywhere to be seen.
Or else y'all 'ill get MIGHTY hungry!