Hey fellow Moosers, I need some help. I have a friend that has a blog, he’s basically a revolutionary, all talk, but basically a revolutionary. He is pretty smart and he has a history degree.
So, I finally got him to come off the ledge and think about some policy. Of course, him being him, it’s pretty extreme.
Here a link to his blog. http://whydontyourelax.blogspo…
What I was hoping for is that some of my Mooser friends can help me ease into this policy idea formation thing he’s trying. I’m going to copy and paste the blog with the few comments that are made so far.
If you feel so inclined, maybe you can comment on his blog to help him out, or if you don’t want to do that, maybe you can comment here and I’ll paste it over there.
So, what do you think? Can you help me ease this guy into the fight?
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011
The Presidents Speech
It’s been a while but I feel compelled to pen some thoughts on the speech today.
Obama’s speech touched on a lot of things that I see as necessary to balance the budget. Themajor issue for me was taxes. You can not balance our budget without having the elite wealthy pay their fair share. Any resistance to this, quite honestly, should be characterized as being unAmerican and a threat to national security moving forward. If we are going to win this fight we need to fight they way the Reps do.
The one thing he didn’t cover in this speech to my satisfaction is the issue of employment in the US. A major factor to our revenue issue is that so many people either don’t have employment or make such terrible wages due to off-shoring of jobs-etc. I believe progressives, et al, should begin devising a plan to promote that would invlove, as extreme as it will sound at first, measures by which if a company doesn’t employ X amount of labor in the US it will be nationalized until it does so. I am busy at work and lack the intellect to develop something like this on my own but I want to float it out there. Tax incentives likely won’t work because the profits to be made for the upper crust disincentivize keeping jobs here. The only way to counter this dynamic is to disempower them by taking their jobs from them.
I would appreciate any ideas to piggy back onto. Again, just to put it in laymans terms: We should devise a plan by where companies who off shore too much of their production base to 3rd world countries will be nationalized and the company’s assests repatriated to the United States until such time that said company has employed an acceptable amount of Americans (thusly to be deteremined) and will then be placed back on to the private market for purchase, thus ensuring that the principles of Free Enterprise and Capitalism continue to benefit our nation over our Investment Class.
Ok, let’s have your ideas. Go.
Posted by Discomustachio at 12:07 PM
3 comments:
Jim said…
Here are some ideas you need to put out there and answer to get any traction:
1. Under what authority can we do this? National Security sounds good, but what about when the wars are over?
2. How do you define a US company?
3. If you take over a company, how will you reimburse shareholders? Many shareholders are regular people who hold stock in the 401k or pension.
4. Who will manage it?
5. How will it affect trade?
We can start there. These are some initial questions that will have to be answered to make this a serious option.
April 13, 2011 3:34 PM
Discomustachio said…
OK I will start with Jims questions and have anyone else who interested dive in.
1) We don’t have to be at war for something to be a threat to national security. Al-Qiada was a threat to national security before they ever attacked us. So I would again argue that too many uemployed not paying into the tax system is a threat to revenue and therefore a threat to our security. This clearly wouldn’t be placed under military authority lest we suddenly become Egypt under Mubarak. Perhaps a model we could use would be the example of General Motors and their bancruptcy. They were taken over by the government, they did all of that restructuring, and then gave it back to GM. I envision a similar dynamic however instead of saving a company-corporation from bankruptcy the function would be to ensure the companies economic activity overwhelmingly benefited Americans (by employing them)
2. A company that is headquartered/owned by/etc Americans. I realze legal defintions need to be drawn but didn’t we bail out Goldman Sachs because they were an American company? What makes them an American company?
3.I don’t see a need to reimburse shareholders as the purpose of all of this will simply be to shift the labor force back to the US. If you have a toy factory in China paying $2 a day and you shift it back to Cleveland and have them pay $14 an hour if investors don’t like that then I say fuck em: You can either accept lower returns, pay more in taxes, or hire BLackwater for crowd suppression because we need jobs and these people are going to rob your house once they are hungry enough.
4. The gov’t has all kinds of committees. I don’t see why a process can’t be developed for this. We supposedly have a process for having a “too big to fail” bank be destroyed without crushing the economy. I don’t see how this would be vastly different.
5. Affect trade with who? Using China as an example what do we need from them accept cheap credit and rare earth materials? Nothing I can think of. If we are selling our own products to ourselves it’s true that the cost of manufacture would be going up but wages would also be paid to citizens. Either someone can work part time at a gas station for $7.25 an hour and pay $22 for a chair at Wal Mart or they can make $14 an hour at the factory that makes the chairs. Even if they don’t bring one home for free they probably pay $30 for the same chair but have a job that can give them a living wage. A living wage: Something Globalization has utterly destroyed in the US.
I don’t have all of the answers and I realize this is not one of my best ideas. However it is the spirit of the idea that I think matters most. Again. it is my hope that perhaps my sorta decent idea with the proper input can become a good idea.
Discuss…
April 13, 2011 6:15 PM
Jim said…
The reason I think it’s important to define what an American company is because of exactly what you said. A US company is one that’s based in the US, well if that’s the case and the company thinks it can make more money with fewer US workers, then what’s to stop them from moving their HQ to outside of the US to avoid the takeover you describe, even abandoning it if necessary.
I also think you are underestimating the shareholder effect, there are a lot of average, middle class people who are invested in the stock market. They are invested in their 401k or pension. They are invested in mutual funds, these things are generally not used for high investment earners that you are talking about.
A trade war with any country would be painful for our country even if all our jobs were shipped back, they may be laid off anyway.
April 13, 2011 6:46 PM
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