Salvaging What Is Left Of America Step 2- Putting Americans Back To Work

First, let's get one thing straight, the real unemployment rate is not 5.1 percent as reported by the government. The U3 is fictitiously low because it excludes people who are employed part time, but would prefer a fulltime job, and doesn't count any one who has been looking for a job for longer than four weeks in its statistics. The real unemployment rate, the U6, which considers part time workers who would prefer a full time job as unemployed and counts everyone who is still seeking employment after being unemployed for over four weeks, is 9.9 percent. Statistics may be deceiving, but numbers don't lie. At this point in time, 9,000,000 able bodied Americans are unemployed and another 6,800,000 are underemployed. More importantly, there are 14,000,000 fewer people in the labor force than there were in 2007. So what can be done to put Americans back to work? We needn't concern ourselves with the educated elite, there are plenty of jobs for them (well, maybe not if they majored in African American Studies; women's studies; or cannabis cultivation at Oaksterdam University.) No, the problem we face is finding a way to employ the uneducated not to bright segment of our population who used to dig ditches and tamp railroad ties but now have been replaced by mechanical ditch diggers and railroad track layers. When all is said and done, we have two choices. We can continue to pay an ever increasing number of our citizens not to work or we can make jobs available to them that pay a living wage. First, how do we make the jobs available. We begin by bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. We should be making sneakers and Air-Jordan's in America, not buying them from companies who manufacture them in third world countries where workers are treated as near slaves. Today, almost everything we buy is labeled "Made in China" or some other deplorable place where the masses live in abject poverty and work for a few dollars a day. This must stop, and we stop it by increasing the import tariffs on everything from shoes to cigars and plastic toys. Everything! Along the same lines, we must pay a fair price for things that are made in America The cost of a head of lettuce springs immediately to mind. The cost of lettuce produced in California is about $3.00 a head. At present the worker who produces the lettuce is paid around $18,000 a year, not nearly enough to support a family. Guess what, if we paid an agricultural worked a wage of $50,000 to produce our lettuce, and all other production costs remained the same, the cost of that head of lettuce we buy at Walmart would only increase 50 cents to around $3.50 a head. The point of this tirade is this. We, as Americans, should be willing to pay a fair price for the things we buy based on the cost to produce them in the good old USA, not based on the cost to manufacture or grow them in some far off country where people live in abject poverty and work for almost nothing. A import tariff designed to level the playing field for Americas unskilled workers is the answer. Along these same lines, how much more would you have to pay for a pair sneakers if they were made in America rather than Bangladesh? The answer is, it doesn't make any difference, we should be willing to pay for whatever it costs to make them in the USA. Making jobs available for people with cognitive limitations will only solve half the problem. If jobs are available we must make sure able bodied males take them! Because of our generous welfare system (how many of the unemployed do not have a roof over their heads, a couple of flat screen TVs hanging on the wall, and a car or two parked on the street, not counting the ones up on blocks) many unemployed people do not believe it pays to work. Guess what, I agree with them! Others believe that manual labor of any kind is beneath them. I can't buy into that one. This attitude must change. When I was growing up in rural Humboldt County, any male who did not have a job was considered somewhat of a societal outcast. To put it another way, it was considered unmanly not to work. We must return to the days when people took responsibility for their own lives and the lives of their families and, if jobs are available we must compel people to take them. No, we won't put a gun to their heads and force them to work but, on the other hand, if they refuse to work we won't be sending them a fat welfare check and food stamps every month either! What do we do with the homeless? After all, they are part of the unemployed. First, we must understand that most of the homeless are mentally ill. When I was attending the USC Medical School in the early 1960s one of our rotations was to Norwalk State Mental Hospital. At that time it provided care for around 10,000 mentally ill people who were deemed, by the courts, to be incapable of caring for themselves. There were several other similar institutions in the state including the one in Napa. In those days the mentally ill were cared for by the state and not allowed to aimlessly wander the streets and live in abandoned houses or under bridges. This rational approach to the mentally ill changed when Ronald Reagan

was governor of California. The psychiatrists convinced Regan that, with the newer psychiatric medications then available, the vast majority of institutionalized mental patients could be managed as outpatients We all know how that worked out, don't we? In any case, a significant segment of the unemployed are mentally ill and it is unreasonable to think that they can be employed or, for that matter, care for themselves in an increasingly complex world. The answer is recognize that Regan's experiment was an abject failure and to re-institutionalize them. Can you imagine walking down the streets of San Francisco if they were free of feces, urine, garbage and the homeless? I don't know that I can. To summarize, we must determine who can work and who, because of physical or mental disability, cannot. Society has a moral obligation to care for those who are disabled for whatever reason. Society also has an obligation to provide employment for those who, through no fault of their own, do not have the mental capacity to compete in today's high-tech world. We accomplish this goal by bringing manufacturing jobs back to America; placing a stiff tariff on imported goods manufactured in third world countries; and paying a decent living wage to anyone willing to work. In my new world, those who refuse to work will not be sitting around all day watching TV, swigging beer and smoking weed, that's for sure!