Obama, Democrats get their wish list so why not me?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Stimulus seeking congressional Democrats and President Obama made their pork barrel and social spending wishes come true last week, at a starting cost of more than $2 trillion in added budget deficits.
I’d like to stimulate the economy, too, so here’s my wish.
Let’s recapture all the industries lost to China and the Pacific Rim – electronics, textiles, clothing, furniture, precision tools, the list runs to thousands of classes and sub classes of industries.
And don’t worry about imposing tariffs or breaking trade treaties. That won’t be necessary.
Being privately funded by profit-seeking investors, my plan, first offered in 1996, won’t cost a dime. In fact, by triggering a construction boom it will launch a modern economic miracle that will spread to feeder industries all over America.
Start with a pilot project or projects to build and equip factories aimed at taking back industries and jobs.
Pay Mexican and other Latino workers good wages by south of the border standards but well below the union-inspired rates that have proven disastrous to so many U.S. companies. The laborers live in northern Mexico and commute via secured transportation to and from factories.
Point out to union leaders, and the politicians who tremble before them, that not a single union job can be lost. These jobs are gone from our shores unless somebody figures out how to take them back.
Stop trillion dollar trade deficits on the horizon with China and other Pacific Rim nations, which use to their advantage some of the cheapest labor on the planet.
Start an orderly process for worthy Latinos to gain U.S. citizenship, replacing the chaos of illegal, sometimes criminal, immigration for which our federal politicians seem to have no answer.
Strengthen the hand of U.S. law enforcement, which can then tell any illegal immigrant whose work is not essential to our country, “You say you want a job, fine, get to the Mexican side of the border and apply.”
Stop the waste of ocean shipping charges and ease the very real worry about what comes into the United States via shipping which apparently cannot be reliably monitored, there being so many ships entering our ports.
Provide good blue collar opportunities for tens of millions of Americans and legal immigrants qualified for more than stoop labor or burger flipping but uninterested in jobs or professions that require academic training. Think of all the tinkerers – Ford, Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, the list is long – who built American industry from factory or workshop floors without benefit of Harvard, M.I.T. or Cal Tech. Unless we act, they soon will be coming out of China.
A congressional act to take back lost industries could start with a single pilot venture at a new factory built by American contractors using new equipment made in America and staffed mostly by Latinos.
Pick for the pilot any manufacturer whose factory has been shuttered, workers fired, and product once synonymous with America no longer even manufactured here.
It might be the iconic Petersen Manufacturing Co. of DeWitt, Neb., whose founder invented the Vise Grip form of pliers. Within the year, the business closed and moved to China.
Politicians and pundits are fond of comparing our economic downturn with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Did Franklin D. Roosevelt get us out of depression with his make work pork barrel spending and social engineering or did he keep us in longer than necessary?
This week of Obama “stimulus” has seen an updated revival of the gag from the 1930s, i.e.:
“Moses said, ‘Pick up your shovels. Mount your ass. I will lead you to the promised land.’”
Obama says, “Lay down your shovels. Sit on your ass. This is the promised land.”
The Roosevelt-era Depression of the 1930s didn’t really end in America until the country entered World War II.
When it was time to fire up the “Arsenal of Democracy” in 1941, American factories were waiting to hum and hire.
That won’t be the case this time unless Washington gets unexpectedly innovative.
That is why I’m wishing for border factories – tens of thousands of them!
February 2009
