More Federal Mingling in a Wrecked Economy

(AP 9/28/10. Senate bill on exporting jobs fails)

Tax legislation that would have punished U.S. firms that export jobs has failed in the Senate. The bill was a Democrat ploy just five weeks before the Nov. 2 election.

If I were a businessman, holding my nose, I would have to side with the party of NO (Democrat characterization of the Republican Party) in this case. Since 1945, the Democrats, in collusion with the labor movement, were the architects of legislation favoring labor unions and environmental requirements creating a stranglehold on US Companies that produced goods for export. I am not challenging whether or not laws were necessary, but too much of a good thing is equally bad. To be sure, the "free" trade agreements or GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) were implemented under Democrat President Clinton’s watch.

Companies are in businesses for two reasons – to turn a profit and to provide dividends to stockholders. The outcome of that effort is jobs. In order to beat the Democrats at their own game, thanks to the Clinton conundrum, companies moved offshore. Now we import what we used to export, from countries that have no minimum wage laws, no vacations, no worker insurance, no OSHA, no DEP or EPA as goods are produced cheaply with a profit and dividends to the stockholders of those offshore companies. This is not free trade, but unfair trade, which led to the demise of American manufacturing.

The Corporate CEOs of these offshore companies enjoy an undeserving seven-figure salary, while they have little concern for tomorrow’s diminishing domestic jobless buyer’s pool. And the Democrats have no concern about driving corporations (jobs) offshore. So now, after all the obstacles they’ve created for domestic business, they want to tax companies and eliminate one more escape route from a federal bureaucracy led by people with little or no experience in the free market. I have no respect for either side of the argument. As a Tea Party director, I am focused on saving my nation from both sides and their myopic look into the future. The federal government has become nothing more than a lifetime parasite sucking on the teat of a diminishing free market.

Rod Miller
Berks County Patriots, Vice Chairman