Some Voting Advice, Solving the Job Crisis and a Reprise of "The Meeting"

NOT IN MY LOCKER ROOM!

Deciding How To Vote

The 2016 Presidential campaign has come down to a contest between two personalities.   Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, attack Donald Trump as being unqualified for the Presidency and raise questions about his treatment of women, his business practices and his temperament.   Republicans, including Donald Trump, attack Hillary Clinton as being secretive, dishonest and less than competent.  While these thing might color the way one perceives the candidates, no one, Republican nor Democrat, should let these kinds of things be the final determinant as to how they vote.

Instead, voting preferences should be determined by where the candidates stand on the important issues facing the country. 

A summary of Hillary Clinton’s positions on these issues may be found by visiting the section of her web site devoted to them.  Check it out at

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/  or by clicking right here.

Donald Trump’s positions on these issues can be found by visiting https://www.donaldjtrump.com/POSITION and clicking on the “Positions” tab at the top or by clicking right here.

There are several “non-partisan” web sites which compare the positions of these two candidates, side by side or one after another.  For example, the Council on Foreign Relations’ site does this in regard to China, Immigration, Trade, Security and similar areas of concern to Americans  Check it out by clicking right here. 

You have a decision to make and you should not make it based on rhetoric less sophisticated that that usually found in elections for Middle School student councils. 

Also, in watching the candidates on television, be aware that in speaking to their own supporters, in “preaching to the choir,” what they say is aimed at reinforcing their support and not in stating or clarifying positions.  Debates and press conferences, on the other hand, force candidates to more directly face the issues.

Two aspects of this particular Presidential campaign which are important are the inability of a gullible electorate to distinguish lies from the truth and the ability of that same electorate to forgive, or overlook, past shortcomings on the part of the candidates.

Voting decisions should be based on the candidates’ positions on the issues.  But bear in mind that much of what a candidate might want to accomplish might be far beyond the powers of the Presidency, and attainable only with Congressional cooperation.  Beware of positions which are “easier said than done.”

Jack Lippman

NOT IN MY LOCKER ROOM!

Providing Jobs for All ... An Economic Manifesto

When the first settlers arrived in the Colonies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, those with money came with land grants from the British Crown and they and their heirs were pretty much set economically for several generations at least.  We knew those folks as the Southern aristocracy, owning plantations and slaves, or as northern businessmen, often profiting from the labor of indentured servants.

But as the country’s population grew, there was not enough land available for those who wanted to farm for a living, nor were enough jobs available for those who were willing to trade their labor for a salary, particularly when in half of the country, they were competing with slaves whose labor came at the far lesser price of the modest cost of basic room and board.  Neither did we need many more artisans and storekeepers in what had been the original colonies.  From that time forward, probably at about the beginning of the Nineteenth century, it appeared that there were not enough jobs in America for all of us!  Or, at least enough jobs in the right places.

But the solution to this was to “Go West, Young Man” as Nineteenth century editor Horace Greeley famously urged Americans to do.  If they purchased it or could fight for access to it, land was available from the Appalachians to the Pacific.  And as farms and ranches grew there, businesses and jobs in towns, usually close to the rivers and railroads which were the nation’s avenues of commerce, appeared.  And from the raw material taken from farms and mines, manufacturing grew, adding more jobs.  The country grew richer.

But as families grew larger and immigrants came, even the Midwest, the plains, the mountains and the Pacific coast filled up, just as the rest of the nation had been continually doing.  Two problems arose. Continued geographic expansion was no longer possible and advances in technology were making labor less and less necessary.  While new jobs indeed were created by this technology, they were not in numbers equal to the jobs it eliminated..  And many jobs, requiring the least skill, were exported overseas where low-cost labor was and remains plentiful.  And this job outsourcing is now also growing in regard to jobs requiring greater skills, as technology advances overseas as well as here.  Remaining are our meanest domestic and agricultural jobs which immigrant labor is glad to take on, as well as retail, transportation and delivery service jobs but with salaries not so generous as they might otherwise have been in more favorable times.

The wealth of a nation is measured by its gross domestic product, generally defined as the monetary value of all of its finished goods and services produced within it within a specific time period, usually a year. Ours continues to increase although at a slower rate than it had over past years.  But it is doing so, sadly, with fewer jobs while our growing population requires more jobs.  This lack of jobs hurts the consumer and pushes more people toward poverty, or such polite excuses for poverty as forced early retirement or seniors finding it necessary to live with their children and young people often living with parents long after they should be out on their own.  In a nation with a growing gross domestic product, this should not be so!  The wealth may be there, but the real jobs are not, and we can no longer, figuratively nor literally, “Go West.”

So what do we do about it?

As I have frequently suggested, what jobs there are must be rationed, so that all Americans have the opportunity to have their fair share of the work available.  This would require a limit on the number of hours each week that a worker may work. Thirty hours seems reasonable.  It also would require a mandatory requirement age.  Age 55 seems reasonable.  More leisure time and more leisure years would not be a bad thing.

This must be accompanied by increased training of workers to keep up with technological advances, as well as many projects, public and private, to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure.  But these would not by themselves avoid the necessity of job rationing.  But they must accompany it.

This raises the question of how, with a limited share of the available work, Americans will still earn enough to maintain a decent standard of living, paying for food, shelter, education, health care and planning for retirement.  The answer is that It will require a measure of wealth redistribution through higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  Easily, that group might be defined as those within the top twenty-five percent of taxpayers.

This will provide for increased Social Security benefits, including health care, and the subsidization of businesses so that they may grow, pay fair salaries and contribute to portable requirement plans as well.  Reduced taxes on business will also assist them to do this.  This will serve to enable them to provide these jobs, maintaining consumer spending. 

 

The ideal result of this would be a gross domestic product growing strongly enough to provide Americans with enough of the nation’s wealth to maintain a decent standard of living and retirement, even with a reduced work week and earlier retirement.  That should be our goal, incrementally attainable within a five or a ten year period.  Oh, there will have to be some "belt-tightening" in the early stages, but eventually, everything will work out as further adjustments in the work week, retirement age and tax rate are effected.  Nothing will be written in stone.

Sound radical to you?  Please let me know your ideas for dealing with the future of employment in the United States.  Are they any better? Remember, we can no longer “Go West” and that any outsourced manufacturing which we manage to bring back will require far fewer workers here than it took a generation ago, as well as resulting in higher prices for consumers. 

In a nutshell, my solution would be job rationing accompanied by technological training for workers, a rebuilding of our infrastructure and higher taxation of the top twenty-five percent of taxpayers.

Jack Lippman

NOT IN MY LOCKER ROOM!

The Meeting

Jack Lippman

This story originally appeared on this blog about six years ago.  It is worth re-reading since it explains, in part, how we got to Donald Trump.

  

The meeting was held in a secluded and luxurious chalet in the foothills of an isolated mountain range.   A private airstrip was the only access to the place other than a rugged unmarked road used to bring in the staff, food and housekeeping essentials from the nearest town, sixty miles away.  A number of private jets were parked at the end of the runway where the hangar and fuel depot were located.

The men, all casually dressed as if they were there for a weekend of hunting or fishing, sat around a large conference table.  They shall remain nameless, but suffice it to say, each one represented personal wealth in excess of the 300 billion dollar level, which made their eight figure annual salaries almost meaningless.  These were the wealthiest men in America.   If I were to identify them, you would not recognize one name.  Each had gone to great lengths to preserve their anonymity, a quality common to possessors of wealth of this kind.

“Gentlemen,” intoned a short gray-haired man sitting at the table.  “In order to get to our agenda promptly and tend to business, I want to remind all of you of what our group is all about.  I am sure you all already know this … that is why you are here … but these ideas bear frequent repeating.”  No one said anything.  A few of the men nodded their assent.

"Although we as individuals are clearly the most charitable people in the world, our prime objective is wealth preservation.”

“Not exactly,” someone interjected.  “I am not in the least charitable.  I don’t care if people out there live or die or starve or whatever.  I donate for tax purposes.  If the God damn government took away the deductions I get for what I give, and what my foundations give away, I wouldn’t let loose of a red cent.”

“Thank you, George, for your comments.  But let’s get on with it,” the discussion leader continued. 

“Ideally, it would be wonderful if there were no such thing as taxes.  Some of you, I know, have moved a lot of your wealth to countries where there are practically none, but we all know there are limits to how much of that you can do.  So long as we are Americans, we must do as much as we can to keep taxes here to a minimum and deductions and loopholes at a maximum.  We must have a government, for without one, we would lose the protection it provides to allow us the freedom to do what we want with our money.  And of course, at a minimum, we need an army and navy to provide that protection.”

George raised his hand, was recognized, and spoke up.  “Bull.  We don’t need the government to provide us with a military.  We can hire our own.  It’s cheaper that way.  There’s plenty of mercenaries around and no one gives a shit if they get killed.”

“George, thank you for your comments.  That’s something to consider, but let’s get on.  Even though the maximum tax rate is down to 35%. that's still a big hit.  Even with deductions and shelters, it takes a lot out our wallets.  The Democrats would like to see it go back up to 39%, like it was under Clinton.  I would love it back down to 25% or even lower.  Single digits would be fine.  And paying into Social Security is something we must avoid.  That’s a bottomless pit. We only pay into it on a miniscule fraction of our income but I would hate to see that changed, and there are those out there who want to do exactly that.”

“Look at the numbers, though. There are only ten of us in this room and there are maybe another 100,000 top-bracket taxpayers out there who are almost in the same boat as we are, and we are speaking for them too.  Our task is to make sure the government keeps doing it our way.  We have to get the country behind us.  That Norquist fellow did a fine job getting a lot of Congressmen to pledge never to increase taxes nor get rid of our blessed loopholes, but he’s beginning to lose his credibility.  Bush helped him a lot to connect to the conservatives out there, but that’s history now.”

The discussion leader paused briefly, looked out of the massive picture windows at the spectacular scenery surrounding the chalet and continued.  

“As I see it, we must do everything to promote the idea that tax increases, in any form whatsoever, including removing loopholes and deductions, are extremely bad for the country.  We must drill it into the heads of all Americans that taxation removes incentive to invest and grow the economy at all levels and kills jobs.  That gets them every time.  We have to get that into the schools at all levels, even kindergarten.” 

“Ha,” someone laughed.  “Maybe we should put out an Ayn Rand inspired comic book for kids.”

“Great idea,” the leader chuckled. “But this is no laughing matter.  We must convince America that the Laffer curve, the economic ideas of Milton Friedman and of course, of Frederick Hayek, are irrefutable truths, deserving of as much respect as the Ten Commandments.  And that the Keynesian policies of using government spending and higher taxes as tools with which to manage the economy, and to provide an unearned safety net, are poisonous.”

“The way to do this is to convince a majority of Americans of the validity of our positions.  And this is a great time to continue to do this.  The citizenry is hurting and they, like us, are taxpayers.  We need them on our side. They will buy this argument that taxes are the cause of all of the country’s problems, if we shove it down their throats hard enough and often enough.  Put the blame on the government.  It spends too much.  On anything and everything.  As a wise person out there has said, ‘we have to starve the beast.’ "

"If the funding for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and every government spending program out there were cut at least in half, we would never again need to even think about raising taxes.  We might even cut them significantly.   Frankly, I know people would be hurting and some might even die, and things the government does, like roads and dams and research, would have to be eliminated.  But it is far more important that this nation preserve our freedom to accumulate wealth without having to share it with anyone else through excessive taxation.  It’s our money. We cannot have anything that would even hint at the Marxist concept of wealth redistribution.  That’s what high taxes really are. The French cut off Louis XIV’s head to start this God damn leftist ball rolling and we aim to make sure it is stopped right here.” 

All those around the table rose and applauded the speaker.

“Okay, here is the way we do it.  And it has to be done so convincingly that even the Congressmen and local politicians who come aboard actually believe this stuff with all their hearts.  That won’t be easy, because some of them are really smart, but we need to make them believers.” 

1. We must control the media.  We have to have at least one or two major TV networks in our pocket whose programming we can control.  We must dominate talk radio, internet web sites, newspapers, particularly in smaller cities and towns, and magazines.  Once they get our message out, it gets E-mailed all over the country, multiplied ten-fold.  


2. We must fund foundations and institutes which provide legitimate appearing material and documentation, telling our story, to be provided to the media.  Generously endowing a few hard-up colleges or universities can result in strong support for our position from the academic world.  


3. We must ally ourselves with groups who seem susceptible to adopting our ideology because they are already single-mindedly devoted to one cause or another.  This blind devotion can be easily transferred to our cause. This will increase our numbers and believe me, this is very applicable to members of Congress and local legislators.  The groups with which we must ally ourselves are endless.  They include pro-Israel groups, pro-life groups, creationists, anti-fluouride groups, home schooling and pro-educational voucher groups, evangelical Christian groups, anti-immigrant groups, chambers of commerce, some professional societies, sporting groups, bankers associations and Second Amendment groups.


4.  We must repeatedly attack any opposition to our positions.  Innuendo and stretching the truth can be used to discredit any who disagree with us.  Guilt by association and lies, even ones easily disproven, are effective tools since refuting them takes the opposition’s eye off of the ball.  Individuals who are in financial distress can be coerced. Anything questionable in an opponent’s personal life should be capitalized on.

“Gentlemen, to embark on this program, we have established an off-shore funding center with access to all of our accounts in this country.  Everything is cryptographically protected to a degree beyond the capability of any government in the world to decipher.  You will never be identified as being involved in this program. Take a deep breath, gentlemen, for here is the price tag to do this job properly." 

"If any of you are not willing to contribute $200,000,000 to this effort right now and commit to that amount each and every year for the next ten years, you may get up and leave this room right now. All of your jets out there have been refueled and are ready to take off with you if you so choose. Remember though, what I propose  is not only for your good, but for the good of the country as we know it.  You see, I am firmly convinced of the truth of every word that I have said.”  

He rose and looked at all of the men sitting around the table, making eye contact with each of them individually.  None of the nine other men even budged nor made any motion to leave their seats.  He paused for half a minute and only then, smiled.

“Okay, then.  Let’s have lunch and afterwards, I want to introduce you to a few people who will make sure every penny of the two billion dollars that you have just pledged is well spent … and turn over the chair of our group for the next year to whomever is next in alphabetical order.  That’s you, George, right?”

Everyone leaned back as white-jacketed waiters entered the room, laid down fine bone china and sterling silver table settings and prepared to serve a lunch which did not come from McDonalds. 

     

     

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NOT IN MY LOCKER ROOM!

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