What Has To Happen

What has to happen

Almost every ill that America suffers comes back to one thing: Jobs.

If everyone had a job, then most problems would go away. Jobs create success and prosperity. When there are jobs, there are fewer idle people with nothing to do but cause trouble. When there are jobs there are less despondent people taking drugs to dull their pain. When there are jobs, it creates more jobs and satisfaction. There is more possibility for racial integration and movement up the class ladder.

For decades, since the 1960s at least, we have been shipping our jobs elsewhere. Why? Because we get paid too much. Why pay a guy in Connecticut 25 dollars an hour to make good quality leather shoes that sell for 60 bucks a pair when you can pay some Chink 1 dollar a day to make a cheap pair for 5 dollars. Who cares if it only lasts a season? Four pair are still less than one good pair, and you get the satisfaction of buying something new and changing style regularly.

We accelerated our job destruction program with every decade, while opening our borders to every one else's products regardless of whether or not they allowed ours in their country.

Now we are in the current situation.

So what we must do, one of two things, is this:

1) Employ anyone who needs a job in a huge factory making an extremely complex thing. Doesn't matter what it is. Ship it across the country to another huge factory where people are employed to dismantle it and the pieces recycled or returned to build more of the thing. Repeat over and over.

This would employe shippers and builders, accountants, managers, janitors, suppliers and all the support industries like diners and cardboard box makers and so on.

Even if the government is paying them, it still would get a quarter of their earnings back in the form of income taxes.

2) The alternative is similar, but at least would work towards a goal. Since the Mississippi is flooding cities every year, employ an enormous program of building a massive man-made lake in Oklahoma or Kansas or somewhere and then pipe off all the excess water every spring into the lake, which stores the water for irrigation in the summer or for recreation, etc. People would be employed digging the lake, making steel and concrete pipe, digging ditches, driving trucks, and they would be good engineering jobs with a worthwhile goal attached, serving the purpose also of restoring many failing midwest towns. After the thing is done, many would be employed maintaining the pipes and cleaning sediment out, etc.

In either case, if you don't have native job creation because your manufacturing is not competitive, then something MUST be done with all the idle people standing around or you get drugs, crime, unrest and racial issues. This is one of the major causes of the unrest that caused the Arab Spring -- the lack of jobs.

Even though the government would be paying and it would be a government spending program, the programs are no worse than Defense spending where thousands of tanks are made and parked and never used. We have entire graveyards of ships, planes, tanks and other things that were made and never used, but that employed millions in their construction, upkeep, storage and so on.

In the end we have to have jobs.