A question for the 2012 GOP Candidates
A recurring theme I keep hearing among the GOP presidential candidates is the need to create jobs by making American companies more competitive in the world marketplace.
What this means in practical policy terms is to lower the corporate tax rate, deregulating the marketplace and eliminating speed bumps (ie: the EPA, lowering carbon emission caps, opening up new domestic oil and gas reserves, lowering workers rights to unionize). The GOP candidates claim that these tactics will reduce the costs of doing business domestically, such that it more economically viable than doing business abroad; resulting in the creation of more American jobs.
The main problem with this ideology is that the main cost of doing business in the United States is the labor expense. Simply put, the cost of employing American workers is higher than nearly anywhere else. There are many reasons for this, but a major aspect of this is that American standard of living is higher than anywhere else, so accordingly, the wages the American worker expects are higher in order to pay for that high standard of living.
Unless the American worker can stand to expect lower wages and a lower standard of living, how can he/she rationally expect to be competitive in the global labor marketplace?
Simultaneously, the GOP stands to support free-trade agreements such as NAFTA. Free-trade agreements are created and exist exclusively to support corporate interest groups. These agreements remove the speed bumps (ie: import/export tariffs) that make it cheaper overall to employ workers abroad and import the goods into the US than it would be to employ American workers.
The question that remains to our GOP candidates is: Do you support corporate interest groups, or American workers?
Please keep in mind that cutting the corporate tax rate will shift the burden of American infrastructure (public roads, schools, social programs) to the workers themselves, and “eliminating the speed bumps” will come at the expense of the public good (our natural environment, workers rights).
