Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Commerce, recently wrote a missive that I came across on Linked In's Pulse, entitled A Stronger Middle Class Begins with All of Us
In response to Pritzker's proposals:
1) Most of the jobs that have been created in the post 2008 period are either part time, or low wage - they don't really replace the jobs that have either been outsourced through "Free Trade" or lost in the banking meltdown following 2008
2) Business Tax rates are already low, even negative with the subsidies we tend to give out to even the most undeserving of industries, if anything they need to be tightened up to eliminate loop holes.
3) Trade - the Pacific Trade Agreement that is being shoved down our throats is anything but good for American industry or our workers - it
a) prevents any "buy-American" campaigns, eliminates our ability to regulate imports based on labor content (slave, child etc) or
b) environmental impact, taking the decisions for that outside the American judicial process and giving it to a non-governmental third party paid for and regulated by the very industries that we'd be taking action agains,
c) changes patent and trade mark law to extend proprietary patents beyond their American limitations (presumably our laws have some meaning on this)
d) makes "hire American" programs unenforceable - (See point a above)
In general, just as NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements had deleterious effects (in some cases unexpected - here, with the benefit of 25 years of "globalism" behind us the impacts are more readily predicted) the TPA will have tremendous and debilitating impacts on the US, and other economies through out the world, and further shift the balance of power from duly elected representatives to corporate interests
4) While training models and apprenticeships are certainly interesting, what is really needed is to reinvigorate the creation of full-time, high paid jobs in the US, rather than the part time, minimum wage model that we've adopted in this recovery.
The numbers may look good - but what sits behind them is a completely hollowed out labor market, a declining and disappearing middle class, and the shaping up of another market bubble of gigantic proportions. What sits behind Pritzker's facile and poorly thought through proposals is a blueprint to accelerate that decline and further instantiate the serf-class that has been created in this country.
