The War On Poverty

We've been fighting the war on poverty since Lyndon Johnson was president.  If you think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are dragging on, how about the war on poverty.  So far, it has lasted about 50 years.  The end is not in sight.  That light at the end of the tunnel is definitely a train headed toward us.  Our fiscal situation in Washington is the proverbial train wreck about to happen.

In the 1970's, 1 in 50 people were receiving food stamps.  Today that number has risen to 1 in 7.  Most of these families have at least one person that is healthy enough and capable to work, but that person is unemployed.  As everyone knows, there are quite a few people these days that are perpetually unemployed.  They don't even bother looking for employment.  They are considered unemployable.

If a person is healthy, why are they unemployable?  Very simply said, their skills are not very valuable in the employment market.  Today, we have minimum wage laws, and many people believe that they raise the average wages in America.  It is true that they raise the average wage of employed Americans.  However, if you look at the average wages of everyone, included the unemployed who earn $0 in wages, the average wage goes down.  That is because anyone whose skills are worth less than the minimum wage are unemployable.

The welfare/food stamps/government assistance level also comes into play here.  If you don't earn more working than you would collecting government entitlements, then why bother getting up to go to work?  Of course, there are a number of the so called "low cost countries" around the world where workers earn far less than our US minimum wage, and these workers receive little of no benefits.  There are issues of quality, shipping costs, logistics, etc. that make overseas manufacturing more challenging, but there is a point where the wage differential is so great that the business must move overseas.

That's right; I wrote that the business MUST move out of the US.  The competition we see on store shelves here in America comes from all over the globe.  If a US manufacturing organization can't compete with one from China or Vietnam or Mexico or the Dominican Republic or Korea or wherever, then they will very simply go out of business.  Their only choice is to move manufacturing somewhere else less expensive.  This may mean picking up the US manufacturing plant and moving it overseas or farming out production to a foreign manufacturing company with a plant over there already.  When that happens, we take manufacturing employees and place them on unemployment, and when that runs out, they collect welfare and other forms of government assistance.

Manufacturing employees range from assembly line workers to skilled machinists to plant management folks to skilled support staff.  That includes manufacturing engineers, mechanics, and electricians.  The plants also don't purchase machinery when they quit manufacturing.  The electricity and natural gas used to run the machines drops to nearly nothing.  They won't buy lubricants and parts to refurbish and maintain the equipment.  When manufacturing jobs move overseas, a lot is lost.

The MessAPolitico is perfectly happy to play politics and drive good manufacturing jobs overseas.  Look at all of the benefits they get for themselves:

• The MessAPolitico can talk about how evil big business is in America and say that they will protect the little guy with government regulations and minimum wage laws.
• The MessAPolitico will pay people for the rest of their lives, using our tax dollars to buy votes.
• The folks getting the entitlements will always vote for the MessAPolitico to perpetuate their government hand-outs.
• The MessAPolitico can talk about how much cleaner the air and water is without manufacturers producing pollution (even though the plants in "low cost countries" generally produce more pollution than ours in the USA).
• The MessAPolitico can talk about their compassion for the poor and needy amongst us, while the evil rich folks don't give a hoot about anything but their stacks of cash gained on the backs of the little guys.
• The MessAPolitico can say that the amount of energy used and green house gases produced under their watch is reduced.
• The MessAPolitico can take money from the rich and the upper middle class and use it to give away free everything to the poor from food to shelter to health care.

The MessAPolitico does things that they say are fighting the war on poverty, but paying people to do nothing besides being poor only perpetuates poverty.  This is a lot like supplying arms to your enemy that you are fighting against in a real war.  They raise minimum wage rates to make people better off, but those people end up unemployed and making less instead.  I guess this is another case of the MessAPolitico taking care of themselves and their re-election at the expense of those who vote for them.

The MessAPolitico just doesn't care about America.  They are the ones that are greedy.   They are the ones that are destroying America for their own benefit.  This is what I'm compassionate about.  I will scream this message from the mountaintop or from this blog until folks start to notice.  The MessAPolitico must be stopped before they have destroyed the greatest country on earth.