Is War an Opportunity to Solve China’s Social Ills?

As I continue to uncover for my own understanding China’s interwoven long term strategies and implementation of those strategies, I have been truly awed by her disciplined rise once again to power. Of all the empires on earth, China has somehow uniquely adapted to the world’s changing influences and has repeatedly renewed her dominance, unlike all other nations that ultimately imploded into insignificance through flawed national strategies. However, one China policy above all others seems disjointed in her current quest for world preeminence.

In an apparent attempt to limit internal demand for resources, China implemented over the past 30 years a one baby rule that limits families to one child. The resulting social ills have ripped a malevolent thread throughout China that may only be disposed of through war.

Without safety nets such as social security and Medicare, Chinese parents rely on their children to protect them in their old age. Societal norms require a son for this purpose. Over the past three decades, in the face of China’s family planning policies, Chinese parents have aborted 40 million baby girls to ensure their old age needs are met.

The disastrous results of this deliberate centralized planning aberration are numerous. Because of the need for male children and as a result of China’s artificially imposed birth fines, a growing child trafficking trade now kidnaps 70,000 baby boys a year for sale, destroying families and villages in the process. China now has 40 million males that have no chance of marriage. Wealthier parents, attempting to secure brides for their baby boys, have increased the demand for trafficking of baby girls who are purchased and raised as future brides. Many of the boys, who are now of marriage age and without wives have increased the demand for prostitution. Once again, it has increased the trafficking of young women to serve as prostitutes.

Has China’s policy created a social ill that will continue through the life cycle of 40 million young men with only symptoms of enormous trafficking, or will these ills compel other resulting social ills until the ripples simply cannot be contained within China’s current attempt of world dominance?

China’s historic gender aberration, perhaps a previously unplanned flaw in the context of her more systematically planned hegemonic rise, will influence her transition in ways yet unknown. Whether or not a giant flaw in her otherwise planned society or an intended gender distortion created for ulterior means, this distorting social instability must now be resolved by China’s central planners if she hopes to prosper.

Within the next two decades, the demand for commodities will peak, stressing underlying conflicts between China and EurAmerica while China demands her place as the 21st century hegemonist. Every transition from one empire to another has been marred by great wars including WWI and WWII at the start of America’s rise. An opportunistic solution to this potentially devastating draconian centralized authoritarian social policy that created such a destabilizing gender gap could be to reduce this warring age male population through war.

How Could America Have Squandered the Gold of Ancient Egypt and the Incas?

Gold has been the store of human endeavor since ancient times. While each ounce of gold can hold only a finite amount of labor, perhaps 1,000 hours in non-industrialized nations, some of the gold locked in Fort Knox has touched millions of hours of labor from civilizations untold. For gold’s greatest benefit, as with all money, is not its storage of value but its lasting ability to temporarily hold value in the exchange of non-coincidental barters.

For millenniums, money was the interchange commodity for simple trades as between farmers and herders. The farmer gave the herder a coin in winter for meat, and the herder returned the coin at harvest time for a bushel of vegetables. Farmers and herders relied on the value of gold because precious metals took effort to mine and purify, were tested for weight and purity, and could be stamped, coined and carried. With such a universal appeal, precious metals became synonymous with storage of value and dominated the world’s choice for money.

At one point, America held within its coffers 70% of all the gold that has ever been purified from ancient Egypt and the Incas through modern times. But it was our misjudgment as to the true value of gold that robbed our forts of ingots and brought America to the precipice of ruin. As history’s greatest superpower, why did America not learn from ancient empires that tumbled down the path to insignificance, and why did we allow our government to amass more debt than has ever been owed by every other soul that has ever lived?

1964 marked an accelerating turning point in America’s misfortunes. In 1964, President Johnson was elected to enact Great Society reforms just as America was increasing her involvement in Viet Nam. Baby boomers were entering the work force just as multinational corporations were beginning an upsurge of direct foreign investment and the transfer of jobs to overseas markets. America’s use of oil was peaking just as political undercurrents were coalescing around oil as a geopolitical force.

Six simultaneous assaults on the American dollar joined to fuel the American financial malaise; a lack of fiscal adherence to a gold standard, military excursions in support of American interests, funding of the great society, a lack of will to respond to oil cartels, multinational corporate indifference to the plight of the American worker, and a financial industry gone wild.

America did not Steward Its Gold

Even though, for 600 decades of recorded history, gold was the stable base of transactions, the world has temporarily abandoned this gold standard for the last 5 decades. Our abandonment was not because of the world’s enlightenment that gold is an unnecessary physical impediment to the electronic age of finance. It is because, with no viable alternative, the world has clung to the hollowed out American dollar that inflated beyond the discipline of the gold standard.

In the 20th century, industrialized nations twice attempted to redistribute wealth through great wars that left all of Europe bankrupt. Afterward, America held 70 percent of the world’s processed gold, and became through Bretton Woods the gold-backed, paper money guarantor of the free world. During the next 15 years, America squandered her gold to cover currency imbalances, until by 1960 the dollar lost its legitimacy. Interestingly, it took Spain over a hundred years to squander its 20,000 tons of Inca gold.

From 1971 until now, America and the rest of the world have had little choice but to allow our currencies to float, giving up the imperfect discipline imposed by a gold standard. As a result of America’s freewheeling monetary policies, it is now encumbered by a spend drunk Congress and an obliging central bank that have conspired to reduce the value of America’s 1971 fiat dollar to a mere 17 cents today.

Scholars suggest that the reason for the dollar’s fall was the inevitable Triffin dilemma which requires America to carry a current account deficit to provide the world with reserve currency. Yet debt financed trade imbalances are not required to provide reserves. Reserves could just as well have been sold to other countries as given to them through trade shortfalls. No, America’s post war monetary policies quickly gambled away the historical hegemony that was bestowed on us at the end of two world wars.

This five decade hiatus from a gold standard will prove only temporary. Gold’s appeal as the engine of financial growth has not been lost on China. At the end of World War II, U.S. gold reserve was over 18,000 tons but has since reduced to 8,000 tons. China is executing a strategy of purchasing approximately 250 tons per year and, as the world’s largest producer of gold, producing 320 tons per year, and now has surpassed all but the U.S. as the second largest holder of gold with 2,000 tons.

Military Excursions Drained America’s Coffers

Without the ability to borrow vast moneys, earlier civilizations relied on warring, exploration and conquest to quickly expand their stores of gold. This strategy was not without consequences. To fund war, Rome engaged in coin clipping and smelting with lesser metals to reduce size and value of denarius in attempts to pay soldiers with coins of veiled value. After 200 years, the Roman denarius reduced from 100 percent silver to only 5 percent just prior its army leaving Rome unprotected from invasions and fall. Interestingly, it has taken less than 100 years for America’s dollar value to plunge that amount.

As all empires have before, America found that its wars must be financed with inflation. The Fed supported an excessive expansion of the money supply (dollar clipping), creating debt to fund each of America’s wars. The Civil War added 2.8 billion. WWI added another 21 billion. WWII created another $216 billion. The Korean War was financed with taxes. Viet Nam increased the debt $146 billion. Cold war expenditures cost 1.6 trillion. The first Gulf War cost a mere $7 billion. In contrast, Iraq cost $786 billion and Afghanistan cost $397 billion. Not including the 700 foreign soil U.S. military bases that contribute greatly to America’s balance of payments deficit, her major wars added a total of $3.4 trillion dollars of carried debt.

The Great Society Became the Broke Society

President Johnson outlined The Great Society in his State of the Union Speech on January 4, 1965, saying “The great society asks not how much, but how good; not only how to create wealth but how to use it.” Notwithstanding the good that was done by these programs, they drained America’s future potential GDP growth and the money that would fuel her economic engine.

46 years later, Great Society initiatives touched education, health, urban renewal, transportation, arts and culture, Medicare and Medicaid, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal aid to public education for a total expenditure of $9.5 trillion dollars.

America’s Addiction to Oil Made Us Slaves to the Oil Cartel

Oil enabled powerful nations to create a world order that flowed money from agrarian nations to those that controlled hydrocarbon powered machines. Oil was the catalyst that propelled the 20th century’s world leaders into fortune and thrust the world into war. Oil is a finite fuel, controlled by a few nations that are barely separated geopolitically and have common ancient civilizations and modern goals.

Already struggling from Viet Nam and Great Society debts, America found herself the object of a politically motivated oil embargo in 1973. Fuel prices soared and supplies tightened to cause the 70’s stagflation in America. From then until now, America has not found the political will through fluctuating fuel prices to organize an intervention away from oil dependence.

Since the embargo, America has consumed 250 billion barrels of oil at a total cost of $11 trillion dollars. This debit line in our national budget has only one trade, oil for dollars. Had America given our energy war a smidgeon of the effort of placing a man on the moon, we could have easily reduced energy consumption by 20 percent for the same productive output, transportation, and environmental comfort, and saved 2.2 trillion dollars. Surely, the costs to achieve such a modest conservation would have to be netted from the gross, but those costs could have been internally generated and added to America’s GDP.

America’s Multinational Corporations (MNC) were Indifferent Citizens

While America fought the war on poverty, her political leaders surrendered to the war on American jobs. Certainly, with the relative world peace supported by America’s military, globalization was bound to occur. With the risk of direct foreign investments reduced, the last five decades have unleashed an acceleration of money flow and intellectual capital from America to other countries.

While over 4 trillion dollars have been invested overseas by American uberwealthy, America has also been a receiver of investment, so that the net outflow has only been 0.7 trillion. However, the loss of America’s wealth and jobs has been much greater, contributing to a stagnant workforce where one in four able Americans has been idled. MNC direct foreign investment has indirectly added $4 trillion dollars to America’s debt.

The Fed Financed MNCs and Saved Banks but Failed to Keep America Employed

During most of the 17th century, Europe embroiled itself in wars that killed 30% of its population. Some of the world’s largest banking houses failed as royal debtors defaulted, including England in1672. Finally, in 1694, the king agreed to give the Bank of England authority to print all of England’s bank notes in exchange for bank loans to support his war with France. The newly created Central bank, having transferred its risk of loss to British subjects, profited simply by printing money for the monarchy. However, this excess printing did not stop the emptying of England’s coffers.

After America revolted to escape the monetary control of the Bank of England, Hamilton, the United States’ Secretary of the treasury, proposed a charter to a create a similar central bank for America. Against Thomas Jefferson’s insistence, the First Bank of the United States became the precursor to America’s Federal Reserve. Some say major banks manufactured a bank run in 1907 to destabilize the Treasury and instigate support for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 establishing the Fed, a quasi-agency, private enterprise with a quasi-public board.

From the establishment of the Fed until today, many have argued that major Fed decisions have enriched banks at the expense of the American People. An example is the erroneous decision the Fed made to keep interest rates high for an extensive period of time as America and the World clearly were entering the Great Depression. Also of heated debate was the decision to bail out the banking industry at the start of the Great Recession.

Nonetheless, Fed decisions combined with lobbied efforts to reduce financial regulations, allowed Wall Street to orchestrate multiple financial bubbles that consecutively destroyed value in American portfolios. It cost taxpayers $88 billion to bail out the S&L crisis. The boiling and bursting of the dot.com bubble evaporated $5 trillion dollars. Notwithstanding that the credit default bubble lost the world $30 trillion in value, it has thus far cost America $51 billion in bank bailouts, $787 billion in stimulus, $1.5 trillion in quantitative easing, $5 trillion in lost property values, and with over 5 million bankruptcies and 5 million foreclosures, ruined trillions of dollars worth of wealth generating credit.

In Conclusion

Adding up the numbers versus our $15 trillion dollar debt, it is amazing that the resiliency of the American economy is thus far holding ground:

10,000 tons of gold: $0.5 trillion
Wars: $3.4 trillion
Great Society: $9.5 trillion
Lack of Energy Policy $2.2 trillion
MNC DFI: $4.0 trillion
Banking Debacles: $12.4 trillion +
Total $32.0 trillion

The idea of currencies unsupported by gold reserves is not in itself troublesome. Whether Crowley shells, tally sticks, or paper money, if the market has trust in its role as a place holder for non-incidental barter, any money will do. However without the external discipline imposed by a gold standard, America must instead substitute gold’s imposition for a President strong enough to stand for American sovereignty, a Fed subjugated to defend a stable currency, a Congress selfless enough to impose its own financial discipline, and a willingness of American businesses to defend American jobs. Otherwise, America’s five decade reign over this short lived worldwide fiat money dollar system will come to an end.

Did China Learn from Japan? You Bet!

In 1853, Commodore Perry, demonstrated United States military force on behalf of U.S. business interests. Perry intimidated Japan into a one sided treaty with threat of vanquishing Japan’s much less industrialized military. Having been subjected to America’s use of colonial might, Japan embarked on the Meiji revolution, a modernization frenzy for 60 years, much as has been occurring in China since the 1978 Four Modernizations.

Just as America colonized through WWII for economic dominance, rationalized with a mistaken belief of cultural superiority, Japan colonized through imperial treaties and war for decades through the 1930s. During this time, similarly to China today, Japan’s leadership inspired a deep devotion to Japan’s destiny through education, media, military and other institutions.

Similarly to China’s concerns today, Japan was unable to limit its urbanization and required rapid GDP growth through the 1920s. When Japan’s economy was devastated by the Crash, instead of leaning socialist like America, Japan’s submitting culture turned militaristic, assassinating its elected Prime Ministers in favor of military leadership.

Japan’s military miscalculated its securing of oil from U.S. controlled colonies and eventually lost the war. After the war, the world, retreating from its wounds, was unable to contain decolonization. However, friendly autocratic governments mostly replaced colonies with terms favorable to business interests. The U.S. policy of world military dominance secured these relationships for a time.

In this environment, Japan thrived applying its discipline and tightly controlled banking and industry to a growth miracle. The miracle ended with bubble inflation caused by non secured raw material inputs, loose monetary policy, and a large rise in the valuation of the yen. Japan’s economy, like the United States, also succumbed to globalization.

Did China learn from these events as it prepared to reenter the world stage? You bet.

Of course, Chinese people are not evil and Chinese have long endured too much racism in America. But, no-one should be deceived by the Chinese government’s strategy to secure enough raw materials during this relatively peaceful period as possible for the future inward growth of their nation before such hegemonic relationships are hindered. China learned from Japan’s pre-war mistakes and will not repeat them.

Yes, the Chinese government is manipulating the value of its currency to give it an advantage in the international market. The idea that it is somehow unfair is a bit weird to me. If China wants to accept fewer dollars for its labor, why is it not entitled to do so? The world’s insistence on revaluing currency higher is just a system like any other. China is only copying a technique well implemented by Japan earlier.

Its U.S. strategy has limits, and China is coming to the end of those limits. China has fed off of the United States as much as it can. As a potential fatal flaw, it may have sucked too much life from its host. China must now somehow realize these saved dollars before Bernanke has a chance to take them back through QE2 and Qex’s.

Will the Chinese government collapse any time soon similarly to the end of the Japanese miracle? Heck no.

Defense of Freedom Pragmatically Mitigates National Security Wars

To put our servicemen and women into harm’s way, America must be guided not only by lofty ideals but by self interest and most importantly national security. Our incentives in Korea, Viet Nam, and even the Cold War were guided by a combination of the three. Obviously in recent years, human atrocities have occurred in places like Darfur without our intervention, and we have backed governments that, while lacking protection of human rights, have supported our interests in a hostile environment. While I am sometimes discomforted by our hegemonic decisions, I try to understand the complexities.

The demonstrations begun in Tunisia have now spread headlong into Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, our chief military and economic allies of the region. Our support for Libyan freedom fighters cannot be seen as a support in the eyes of our Allied kings for continued violence against regional leaders. I see the complexity. However, Muammar is a crazed dictator responsible for Lockerbie and state sponsored terrorism. He is a despot that has fairly easily differentiated characteristics from our allies. His willingness to turn military against his own people places his regime in a category of its own.

We are now policing Iraq, at war in Afghanistan, and allied with Israel in an embroiled region that is critical to our national security and standard of living. As the consumer of a quarter of the world’s oil, disruptions from the region will have dramatic effects on our economy. (As an aside, people are not yet speaking of the Step change down in Japan’s energy dependent economy because of its permanent loss of about 6% of its power output that will take several years to replace) So does Libya, who produces less than 3% of the world’s oil supply, pass the ideal, self interest, and national security hurdles?

I say yes, with the understanding that there are risks of enforcing a no fly zone but they are minimal. We placed a similar zone above Iraq, who had a more advanced military, without material losses. None-the-less, the risks of not supporting Libyan freedom fighters is the long term ill wind against America that will blow across the new governments of Northern Africa.

Our resistance to support Sudanese, Iranians, Tunisians, Algerians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Saudis, and now Libyans while securing Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and our friend Israel will have long lasting detriment to our economic security that could be mitigated by some show of support for the democratic ideals that all people see as America’s beacon. If our economy is severely threatened by loss of oil, infinitely more loss of American lives will ultimately be shed.

This old man believes in ideals. Some might fear I forget that ideals are an old man’s folly and war a young man’s end. I believe that given the pragmatic alternative of spending some effort today to secure the historic democratic alliance of a critical world region versus the alternative of major military conflict later with great loss of lives to secure safe transit of oil amidst a resentful coalition, I cautiously prefer the former.

Will America’s Lack of a Multinational Corporation Policy Bring a Resurgence of War? (Part 1)

World history has been dominated by trade wars and military interventions to resolve trade conflicts. From the 15^th through the 19^th centuries, shipping merchants became wealthy competing for trade routes and exploiting price differences between nations’ captive markets.  Wealthier nations financed mercantilism to increase their gold coffers at the expense of other nations that lacked merchant ships and navies to protect them.

In the 19^th century, those nations of Europe and America that had accumulated wealth through mercantilism, now invested in the transformative industrial innovations of their time.  For much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the industrial revolution compounded the wealth of these nations, and advanced the theoretically achievable wealth of the entire world.  However, a concentration of industrial strength by relatively few countries led to export surpluses that drove countries to compete for trade routes, and that eventually caused an eruption of war. 

In the 20^th century, technology advances supported worldwide business capability, yet wars, government corruption, and misguided trade barriers dissuaded businesses from expanding to other countries. But the wars did temporarily thrust underground the notion that trade differences should be settled through bloodshed.  Nonetheless, the United States pursued military dominance.  As the 20th century ended, the U.S. emerged the sole superpower, creating a unique opportunity.  For the first time in history, the entire world could peacefully pursue economic parity.

The world responded by leveraging wage imbalances between the world’s rich and poor nations.  Entire civilizations altered age-old governance systems so their people could participate in world wealth redistribution.  China created a capitalistic engine to support its socialist goals as the center of the ASEAN economy.  India reduced the pressures of its caste system to benefit from newfound prosperity.  And we are witnessing today the Middle East standing up to dictatorships that have shielded their people from participating in the world’s economy

Europe’s and America’s businesses reacted by aggressively expanding into global markets through direct foreign investments of multinational corporations (MNCs). Their expansion resulted in the transfer of both wealth and jobs to other countries, and created a formidable force that wounded America.  As we face down this force, America should be asking the following questions 1) through our military support of world stability, did we better America’s future?, 2) can we simultaneously innovate to advance our nation’s wealth frontier while supporting the rise of the rest of the world?  And 3) have we determined an economic path forward that will protect the world from a reemergence of military struggles?  The answer to these questions will depend on the ability of United States to develop a coherent policy regarding MNCs.

China’s Reserve Currency Strategy

In two previous posts, I discussed a fishing village in which some of the men in the village were required to sit on the bank and not fish because the fisherman from the other village were willing to fish for them at a lower cost.  The eastern village in that story represents the Asian economy, with its powerful core being China, which is willing to accept and some say manipulate undervalued exchange rates in order to grow through exports. But is China manipulating its currency?

Assuming China’s industry has identical productivity to the U.S. and the Chinese worker is conditioned to accept $3,000 annual wages to our worker’s $43,000, then China could conceivably sell anything to the U.S. for a lower cost than we can produce, cover the costs of direct foreign investment, and yet make a profit. If China chooses to keep its profit in hard U.S. currency and build a war chest over time, why would the Yuan need to revalue? China is setting the rate at which it will provide value to the west, and we as consumers are accepting their price. 

The world is flooding China with capital, allowing it to continue this wealth accumulation strategy at the United States’ expense. We are countering by quantitative easing to devalue their store of U.S. value but in the process are exacting payments from all countries that hold dollars as reserve funds.  And now the experiment of the Special Drawing Rights reserve currency has begun.   Countries are banding together to end America’s reign as the provider of reserve currency When that finally occurs, we will have lost a strategic advantage.

We have continued to devalue our currency over the years and holders of our currency have lost value each year as a result.  Nevertheless, developing nations have increased holdings of our dollars as a hedge against downturns in their economies.  Our continuous devaluing through the years could be argued as an appropriate payment for our military’s defense of worldwide peace that has allowed unprecedented trading wealth for all countries. But it’s a stretch to charge the world for our inability to surge real growth during the last quarter century to support the demographical spending desires of our baby boomers and our lack of regulatory oversight of the financial shenanigans of Wall Street.

We Can Regain Jobs That Left With The Multinationals

Early on, our nation made the strategic decision to outpace all others in military superiority. With a military budget that now exceeds all other nations combined, America declared and exercised our right to quickly defend the sovereignty of our allies from over 1,000 U.S. bases that extend our dominance throughout the world. We pursued our goal with such steadfastness that we are now the sole super power on earth. Our military influence has created a worldwide economic bastion that has allowed all nations to far surpass the economic output that could have been produced had not such a peaceful expectation existed.

While this exertion of power created great peacetime dividends for this country, it also created unexpected results, the birth of multinational corporations, or “borderless nations”. Our strategy of military dominance created a much safer, stable world that lessoned the risk of U.S. based companies investing abroad. With risks lessened, businesses could more easily justify moving traditional industries overseas. Unprecedented peace allowed multinational corporations to gut factory towns like Detroit, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh.

While our manufacturing strength was slowly eroded from our shores, our citizenry was lulled into the belief that our future was sound by the successively reassuring waves of the savings and loan bubble, the stock market bubble, the internet bubble, and finally, the Wall Street derivatives bubble. By the time the suds cleared, our nation was left without a significant means of traditional production. While we were being seduced into the belief that our country was financially sound, many of the trade secrets, core skills and financial wealth of corporations had been shifted to other countries.

Meanwhile, our citizens believed that the bubble value of our homes and stock market portfolios would support our needs to consume. Instead, when the bubbles finally stopped popping, we found that our consumer debt was of historic proportions and that our federal, state, and local governments had ballooned to consume bubble inflated tax revenues and were awash in deficits. We now have the unenviable position of being the greatest debtor nation that has ever existed.

While it will be painful for all to reverse this trend that threatens to quickly topple America from its century of hegemony, acting decisively with the right prescriptive tools, we can decide that our nation will not endure a decade of languishing high unemployment. However, if we are to escape the fate of our grandparents, government must partner with American business to create historic advances in innovation and productivity.

A partnered solution that can accelerate our country toward full employment is my voucher plan. It replaces extended unemployment payments with hiring vouchers. Small businesses can hire voucher employees at their unemployment rate. In return, voucher employees can work twenty five hours per week and receive the same pay they would have received through unemployment. The federal government can then reimburse employers the employees’ wages without increasing the federal unemployment budget.

A few benefits include: Employees learn new skills and can continue to seek full employment. Employers lower risks of hiring new employees, spur innovation, and reduce prices of goods and services to compete in the global market. Government supports job growth through direct infusion of dollars into small businesses, and lets the free market determine how to maximize resources.

This idea can employ all Americans now, and can move many from the sidelines of our economy onto the field of American ingenuity and global competitiveness. I ask your readers to share with their representatives thoughts about this voucher plan in hopes that a leader might champion its concept now when we need it most.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yUhBBxHGTU

WWW.Usairambulance.net

Contain Innovation and Core Skills within America’s Borders Through Full Employment Plan

Like other empires that came before, for its first two hundred years, America increased its wealth by exploiting its natural resources through the increasing innovation of its people. Some of our nation’s innovation was diverted to our military to outpace other nations, protecting our wealth. By exporting our military might around the world, America created a stable trading environment for global businesses, adding to the wealth of all our trading partners.

Until the last quarter century, America accumulated wealth, having trade surpluses. Our government supported free trade with the belief that all countries, including the United States, benefited by a greater abundance of goods. However, during the 1980’s, America’s innovative advances did not keep us from trade imbalances, and we began our path from the greatest creditor nation to the greatest debtor nation on earth.

During this time, many of America’s businesses took advantage of the economic stability supported by our empire’s military, and grew as multinational corporations with allegiances to international shareholders. With the rise of multinational corporations, innovative advantages once contained within America’s borders were increasingly transferred to other countries. America’s trade secrets, core skills, and corporate wealth became fungible international commodities.

Even though free trade continues to be touted as a benefit to American consumers, it is becoming increasingly unclear if free trade is a net benefit to the average American. Even so, trying to slow the regression of American wages by erecting trade barriers is ultimately futile. America’s competitive edge now rests with increasing the productivity of its workforce, with continuing our role as the world economic military stabilizer, and with supporting domestically grown and maintained business innovation.

Critical American success factors for our government include 1. Dramatically improving the success rates of our schools, 2. Slowing the growth of our money supply to sustain our position as the reserve currency of the world, thus allowing us to continue to quasi-tax foreign governments holding our dollars to pay for the economic benefit of our military, 3. Significantly increasing support for small businesses, the engines of American domestic business innovation, and 4. Providing for full employment of all able-bodied Americans.

A solution for unemployment:

Government can take bold steps now to partner with American domestic businesses to create historic advances in innovation and productivity. A partnered solution can replace extended unemployment payments with a hiring voucher plan. Domestic businesses can hire voucher employees at their unemployment rate. In return, Voucher employees can work twenty five hours per week and receive the same pay they would have received through unemployment. The Federal Government can then reimburse employers the employees’ wages without increasing the unemployment budget.

A few benefits include: Employees learn new skills and can continue to seek full employment. Employers lower risks of hiring new employees, spur innovation, and reduce prices of goods and services to compete in the global market. Government supports job growth through direct infusion of dollars into domestic businesses, and lets the free market determine how to maximize resources.

This idea can employ all Americans now, and can move many from the sidelines of our economy onto the field of American ingenuity and global competitiveness. I ask you to share with your representatives thoughts about this voucher plan in hopes that a leader might champion its concept now when we need it most.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yUhBBxHGTU

usairambulance.net