I certainly hear plenty of talk about the shortage of jobs. If you pay attention only to right-wing news sources, then you won’t hear it. Their myth is that 10 million people suddenly became unemployed in the last year of the Bush presidency not because Republican policies crashed the economy but because they all got lazy and decided to lay themselves off or bankrupt their firms so they could kick back and collect unemployment insurance.
But other media has been full of coverage of the fact that qualified people have been sending out resumes and submitting applications, willing to relocate anywhere a job is, and have gone months and sometimes years without a single nibble.
A great part of the problem is that beginning with Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Washington made a conscious decision to move manufacturing jobs overseas. We set tax policy to reward corporations for off-shoring US jobs, and punish those who kept work here.
It was really done to let US corporate CEOs and management jack their own salaries sky high. In Japan CEOs make 11 times what their average employee makes. China is about the same. German CEOs take home 12 times as much as average workers. In 1980, the US CEO earned 25 times as much as the average worker, but today they earn 475 times as much.
To justify this insanity, the right-wing think tanks came up with some hokum about America moving from the Manufacturing Age into the Information Age. It would be just like when we moved from the Age of Agriculture to Manufacturing Age, they said. But we never moved from the Age of Agriculture. It’s true that about 95% of the workforce in early America was involved directly in agriculture or in a support job aimed at agriculture. Now that’s down to 5%. But we most certainly didn’t give up growing things. We automated agriculture. We are still the largest food exporter in the world.
The bright boys at the right-wing think tanks preached that we would get rid of the dirty, sweaty jobs and let third-world labor do that. We would move up from the Manufacturing Age to the Information Age. We would charge huge sums to teach the rest of the world how to manufacture. Of course, when you stop doing something yourself, and others start pushing the envelope of six-sigma quality; you can’t teach them how. They have the knowledge and you no longer do. So we outsourced those jobs with no real plan to replace them. It was all done for the benefit of the CEOs and Billionaire financiers who profit handsomely from it. They, by the way, are the people who fund all those right wing think tanks.
Now that we see the ugly underbelly of out-sourcing, we have to change those wrong headed tax policies and bring manufacturing back on-shore. But so far, Republicans in the US Senate have filibustered every attempt to cancel tax incentives for off-shoring work. Their Greedy Oligarch Pig overlords want it to stay just like it is, and they could care less how many families it drops into poverty—it’s fine so long as our loss is their gain.
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