Unemployment Fixes Ignored

Our official unemployment percentages are calculated using our number of unemployment benefit recipients in any given week or month. This number has hovered around 10%. It doesn’t include those who have given up looking for a job or those who are working part-time. If you add those in, you get about 20%. There are about 150 million job holders in the U.S. A 10% unemployment figures means that there are about 15 million unemployed and collecting benefits. If you add in the other 10%, you find that we actually need 30 million more jobs than we have.

Immigration

We have added 1 million legal immigrants each year for the past 10 years. That means we have added 10 million legal job seekers to the 11 illegal immigrants we already have. If we would have restricted legal immigration and fired illegal immigrants 10 years ago, our unemployment over the past 10 years would have averaged less than 4 % and our national debt would have been held at $10 trillion instead of the $17 trillion it is going to become.

Tariffs

We gave away 90% of our manufacturing jobs almost 20 years ago with NAFTA, GATT and WTO agreements. Our electronics manufacturing companies started to buy circuit boards from China to save 50% on product cost. They then sent the rest of their manufacturing the entire product to China. We now have “throw-away” computer printers. Our import tariff is currently 1.2%. It generates $25 billion in tax revenue. It used to be 6% and would generate almost $150 billion in revenue. If we lowered the corporate tax rate to 5% for manufacturing companies who actually built their products in the U.S. and raised the import tariff for those who didn’t, manufacturing would return to the U.S. and unemployment would begin to drop. The best jobs to add would be manufacturing private sector jobs.

Politicians have been wringing their hands over this for years, but the few simple things that could be done have been ignored.

Consider cutting legal immigration to 200,000 a year, raising our import tariff to 6% and cut federal spending by $1 trillion by moving their unconstitutional functions to the states and we would have an economy on the mend. If we then cut foreign aid, close most of our overseas military bases and relocated them on the Mexican border we would have an economy with full employment.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody Ga Tea Party Leader