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Creating Jobs AND Increasing Revenues

There's a children's story that the politicians in Washington have been telling for a while. According to them, we "can't compete." The story goes something like this: since companies can pay a nine-year-old on the other side of the globe twenty bucks a week to make a product, we'll never be able to make the things we used to make here in the U.S. ever again. But that's clearly a bunch of crap.

Fifty years ago, that kid on the other side of the world made the same product for twenty bucks a year, but we still made all the best products in the world here in the USA. The secret is that the politicians are just sandbagging us. If they get us all to believe that common sense laws and tailored effective government can't produce an environment that helps the economy and puts us back to work, then we won't take it out on them when they can't come up with the type of laws we deserve. This kind of hand-wringing didn't fly when I was a sergeant in the Army, and we shouldn't let it fly now.

One American worker does more work than fifty kids on the other side of the world, and he does it better. They've got no excuse for not passing the kinds of laws that would put millions of Americans back to work and for not doing it sooner rather than later. And yet, here we are, four years after the economic crisis and we still have staggering unemployment. The Washington politicians had their chance. Let's get them out of the way and start creating jobs and improving the economy.

There's a second children's story politicians have been telling us for a couple of decades. Politicians in Washington, D.C. like to tell us, "Aw shucks, I'm not a business and economics type. So I should defer to experts in the area when making government economic policy." Then, they put their hands over their eyes when things are going well. They don't do anything, because, the story goes, they're worried that if they try to do their jobs, they might muck things up.

Then, when a financial crisis occurs, the people who lose their jobs get angry and start to seem like they might actually vote for someone else. The politicians realize that the people expect them to do something about it. But since the politicians weren't doing their homework all along, they've fulfilled their own prophecy: they're clueless. So the politicians call the business "experts" who they know, i.e., campaign donors, to "help them" figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. These experts are from the industry where the crisis originated; usually, they're the same guys who need to be bailed out; sometimes they're guys who made a lot of money off of the crisis. Then, the politicians pass whatever laws these guys tell them are needed.

Think about that for a minute. In order to determine how to protect us from irresponsible corporate behavior, they ask the executive officers of the corporations whose behavior got us into trouble in the first place. When challenged, they point out that these men are economic experts. Then, when the crisis is over, they go back to covering their eyes and their ears and doing nothing of substance.

But you know what? We don't have to be economic experts to know what's wrong this. We just have to have common sense. First, we pay Congress to write laws. And the reason why we give Congress a lot of money to hire a staff is to do the research they need to do to become expert enough to write the laws. We made Congress a full time job so they'd have plenty of time to pay attention to what was going on in the country, so Congress could write laws before the crisis. We don't pay members of Congress generous salaries so that they can delegate their law-writing responsibilities to campaign donors.

Second, the last guy who you want to write an industry regulation is a member of the industry. It would be better to have no regulation at all. Common sense says you don't ask the fox to guard the henhouse.