Government Lies…

Posts Tagged ‘Chief Executives’

President Obama is meeting with the chief executives of leading U.S. corporations Wednesday, December 15th. When Obama sits down with the CEOs, he doubtless will extol a series of recent policy moves – the tax deal, the free-trade agreement with South Korea – that business largely welcomes. He then will urge his guests to create some jobs here in the United States. American corporations, according to the Federal Reserve, are sitting on roughly $1.9 trillion in cash at a time when private-sector hiring is stuck at microscopic levels (50,000 net jobs created last month). Small business, dependent as it is on depressed domestic consumption, lacks the funds or incentives to resume hiring. Big businesses, by contrast, are rolling in dough and registering record profits.

Where are these profits coming from you ask? Standard & Poor’s index of our largest 500 publicly traded corporations shows that roughly 47 percent of their revenue comes from outside the country.

But increasing jobs here is just not in the business plans of many of America’s leading corporations. For instance, Apple employs roughly 25,000 people in this country, while Foxconn – the Chinese manufacturer recently beset by a wave of worker suicides – employs 10 times that many making iPods, iPhones and other Apple products. Dell, the computer company, has a similar 10-to-1 ratio.

And seriously, I don’t blame these companies. Legally, and morally, it is the managements job in these companies to increase profits and maintain returns on investment for their shareholders. They are just taking advantage of the playing field that the government has allowed them to establish. And with that I DO have a problem!

Corporate influence on government is way too high! Government needs to raise tariffs and bring mfg. back to America. American corporations need to invest in America.

Lets use the company Apple for example.  Lets say Apple moved all of their jobs back to the US. That would be an employment increase of possibly 250,000 people. But lets say that Apple would sell less products because they would cost more (and they would), so lets be conservative and say 200,000 jobs.

That’s a lot of people working folks. And imagine if this type of jobs increase was across the board for all US companies that do most of their mfg overseas.

How can we do this you say?

Tariffs. Impose an immediate tariff on all mfg goods imported into the US of 50%.

But, everyone immediately screams, that will raise the cost of the consumer goods we want to buy. Yes, it will. Your ipod will probably cost $100 to $200 more. Instead of $499 for the low end model, it might be $700*.

But… there are many hidden costs that you are paying for that cheap ipod that the government, and the corporations lie about. And which, in effect, are a hidden subsidy, and an income transfer, to the wealthy.

Because that $499 ($700) isn’t spent here, there are less workers here to spend their paychecks in our economy, not China’s. There is less tax revenue to pay for our bridges, and schools, and roads. There is less money available for health care. There are the added costs because of the unemployed, the sick, the people on food stamps. And there is the inflationary cost, because of the debt the Government has to accumulate to try and maintain needed services.

In fact, we ALL pay, every citizen of the US pays, in many different ways,  for that cheap ipod you purchased.

And we all pay, every day, for the LIES they keep telling us.

*Labor is not the significant cost of production most people think it is. For instance, if you take into account the different levels of productivity between US vs. Chinese labor, the difference in cost is only 5 times. And labor is probably only 5-10 percent of the cost of mfg. So as far as labor is concerned, if the $499 ipod was mfg in the US, it would cost about $700.