Ideology over facts

SPENDING: Only cuts will answer

Americans just don’t seem to get it. Our industries and jobs continue to be forced overseas by taxes and unions. That makes for fewer taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the number of government employees keeps rising, along with their salaries and benefits, programs, government retirees, et cetera. The whole mess is unsustainable and must come to a screeching halt.

I commend the governors of Idaho and Wisconsin for their actions, but they are only a scratch on the surface. Don’t believe what the Feds are saying about “recovery.” It isn’t happening.

We must get serious now or the Great Depression will begin to look like good times. Cut, cut, then cut some more. We have to do this.

Bruce McKay
Hayden

First of all, Bruce McKay can hardly blame taxes for why corporations off-shore the jobs.  Tax cuts for major corporations are only around 35%.  Second of all, around 22 states are “right to work.”  Yet, the statistics exist to provide evidence of high unemployment affecting the states in question, inclusive of Idaho.  So, it can hardly be claimed that “the unions” force corporations over-seas.  It is simply far easier to blame the workforce for the decisions made by the corporate office than actually blaming the corporate office itself.  After all, they are the ones with the money to buy the politicians of their choice.  And affixing blame for the lack of taxpayers where it really should belong, why that would be class warfare!

Then to go even further, let’s also target public employees.  The people who also pay taxes, who are also part of the American workforce, who should also expect decent wages, a retirement, and health care benefits.  There aren’t the taxpayers to support this!  So, if say Governor Butch Otter eradicates almost 800 teaching jobs in the state of Idaho, that must be applauded, even though that also eliminates around 800 more taxpayers.  My overall view of this particular nonsense?  Let’s not stop until we guarantee that the entire state is totally impoverished.  You always know when people refuse to think any more.

Earlier today, on “The Early Show,” the evidence of the “global marketplace” being affected by major disasters.  The massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis has effected the building of cars, car parts, and components for the IPad.  Yeah, that’s the report that was given.  Prices for the Subaru and other Japanese manufactured cars are going to go up because of the major disaster of the last few weeks affecting that country.  Well, yes.   Not only are natural disasters capable of detrimentally affecting a “global marketplace,” so would civil unrest, warfare, and acts of terrorism.  Which means that every country that wants to be involved in such a “global marketplace” should still have an operational manufacturing base to rely on when their “main supplier” gets hit by a “wrath of God,” situation.  No one in their right mind should ever deplete manufacturing so completely as to become totally dependent on foreign manufacture.  Yet, that is exactly where the corporate CEOs want to be, totally dependent on a foreign workforce rather than spending the money in their home country in order to guarantee a supply of products (as well as providing jobs) to the various store shelves and auto dealerships.  Too spendy, right?  We can’t do that.  Well, then neither does the IPad get the necessary parts, that “cheap but far more reliable” Japanese built auto will no longer be so “cheap” or readily available.

Way back when, American television and chip makers whined about Japanese manufacturers “dumping” below cost chips and televisions on the American market.  They wanted President Reagan, to protect them from the “dumping.”  Years later, do we even have American made televisions?  How about American made computers?  It says a lot about those corporations that once whined about needing “protection” from foreign competition.  They simply wave the white flag and ask the competition to do it for them.  It’s “cheaper.”

More recently, there were people commenting to various letter and opinion threads at the Spokesman-Review website.  On one “letter thread,” a fellow posted this comment:  that the consumer could actually be blamed for wanting to buy that Japanese toaster over something actually made in an American factory by American workers.  But as “The Early Show” proved, anything under say the Black and Decker brand of toaster, may no longer be built in this country at all.  The price of the toaster will still be the same on an American store shelf.  But it won’t cost the corporation that outsourced the work any more for the parts or product than it would the consumers themselves if they simply bought the imported Japanese product directly.  That should say a lot right there.  The consumers no longer have a choice about where the product they buy is made in a foreign country; it is made in a foreign country, period.  The only thing “American” about the product is the name-brand of the company.

Would consumers be happy to buy a higher priced product if they knew it would put Americans back to work?  I have no doubt that they would.  Unfortunately, the corporations want to yell about the “taxes” they would pay, and having to deal with “the unions” as to why they couldn’t possibly return a manufacturing base to this country.  Well now, if they don’t; neither will they have the consumers to buy the products that are already more expensive on the store shelves in any American city today than the actual cost of manufacture in a foreign country.  After all, if “union demands” are “impossible” to meet, right along with workplace safety, product quality standards, health insurance, pensions, good wages, property taxes, utilities, and etc.; because of how it presumably takes too much profit from the corporate bottom line; the real bottom line?  The corporation no longer has someone to sell the product to!  A consumer base doesn’t exist without also being employed.

I met up with a fellow where I work in the retail trade yesterday.  He was all about blaming President Obama, blaming the politicians, blaming the corporations as being the very people who will end up destroying this nation.  Well, in the case of the corporations, if they “destroy this country” by willfully keeping unemployment as high as possible (according to what the customer was saying), they will also destroy the very political base that has given them their specific legislative benefits (according to the above letter), and ultimately their marketplace (where they expect to be successful).  So excuse me, but it isn’t “the unions” or “taxes” that will ultimately be blamed for corporate suicide in the “free market.”  Only the decisions made in the corporate office will bring that about.