Poll Question: Mar. 8, 2018

Mar. 06, 2018

4:10 p.m.

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Comments (1)

Nothing brings back jobs like being paid lower than your competition

It's about the TOTAL compensation package, including paid vacation and paid sick days, pensions or 401k matches, employers part of Health insurance, even workplace safety and costs of environmental compliance.

If you really look at it, what "Made America Great" was that we had MANY workers having none of these benefits. It was all those ma and pa General stores, the small business farmers, plumbers, industrial park machine shops, traveling salesmen and car dealers on commission only, barbershops and hair salons, accountants, lawyers, dentists, doctors hanging out a shingle instead of working for a large corporation. Most of these did not have any of those benefits, they only got paid when they were actively working on a paying customer, not paid diddly when waiting between customers. -- Sadly, we put up with this because it was easy to do business under the table and not report the money these "entrepreneurs" did make to the IRS... using the company car and company boat for family use, etc.

Now, lets explore this "thing" about buying foreign steel and aluminum. Rather than buy the raw ore overseas, shipping it here, shipping Arab crude oil here, and then using environmentally damaging refineries and blast furnaces here, it was simply cheaper (and cleaner) to ship only the finished product here. It used up their raw materials, coal and oil, polluted their environment, caused health issues in their workers, and it made life for our CONSUMERS better here. -- cleaner living spaces, cheaper prices. We already had jobs... often jobs for military contractors, the kind of jobs that could not be out-sourced. We "taxed and spent" for that instead of for fighting poverty for our poor people.

You will notice that Trump is not trying to put a Tariff on your precious I-Phones and smart TVs.

That is one other point, much of that tech depends on what is called "rare earth" metals, which simply does not exist here in our continental 48 states. It is much more abundant over in China. A cut-off of China might also stop our tech advantage, China would clean up since they can now manufacture all that tech themselves, and all we can do is pay extortion prices for it.

Last of all, we have far more consumers than workers. So a few workers might benefit, but companies ALWAYS pass their taxes and higher raw materials prices on in one of 2 ways... higher prices for the consumers, lower paychecks for the workers, but NEVER lower salaries for the executives.

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 8 years ago