At a time when all eyes seem directed at Washington for job creation solutions, businesses and state governments have been quietly taking the lead. Instead of waiting for a one-size-fits-all federal solution, they're working together to pursue a comprehensive strategy for job creation that focuses on putting aside our differences and working together to create jobs in America.
Our efforts start with bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. The U.S. has lost more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities in the last decade and a half. We invent products here, but send the production jobs to Asia. The cycle adds to our trade deficit and speeds the disintegration of manufacturing, which has been the backbone of the American economy since the industrial revolution. The decline of manufacturing has wide repercussions beyond finances; it affects our communities, our education system, our national security and our global standing. When we fail to make things, we're losing more than jobs. We're losing a piece of our American identity.
Some have given up on American industry, saying manufacturing jobs are not coming back. Business leaders beg to differ, evidenced by growing efforts at reshoring and a recommitment to the "Made in America" label. And Mississippi, among other states, is leading the way. Since 2004, an aggressive job-creation agenda has brought higher skilled, higher paying jobs to Mississippi. The result: Employment is higher now than it was before Hurricane Katrina and per capita income increased 34 percent over the last eight years.
These successes stem from state and local governments and business leaders accepting that the renaissance of American manufacturing won't happen overnight, and resolving to bring the restoration about by rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. There is no magic pill from Washington. Job creation is driven by the growth of small businesses and real gains can be made when entrepreneurs collaborate with their state and local governments to develop innovative solutions.
As a Virginia businessman and a former Mississippi governor, we are proud of our success story. We have been able to slow the rapid loss of manufacturing jobs in one hard-hit part of the country because of a jobs-before-politics philosophy exemplified in our unlikely partnership: a Democratic businessman who purchased an award-winning, advanced Chinese car company and moved it to America, and a Republican governor who fought hard to bring manufacturing jobs to his state. As the former chairs of the Democratic and Republican national committees, we've had plenty to disagree about over the years. But we found common ground in creating new jobs. Jobs should not be a partisan, political issue.
Now two years later, GreenTech Automotive's first manufacturing facility in Horn Lake, Miss., is creating hundreds of new jobs and supporting thousands more. Furthermore, these jobs are built for the future, providing next-generation solutions to America's energy needs by manufacturing all-electric, zero emission passenger vehicles.
In addition to these new jobs, GreenTech Automotive is shipping Made in America vehicles around the world and proving that America remains the world's best place for manufacturing quality products. We're not content to stop here. For example, similar efforts are underway to restore jobs in Virginia, where we are exploring repurposing a shuttered facility to produce wood pellets for export into the growing European biomass market.
Long-established automakers including Toyota and Nissan have come to Mississippi in the last decade, creating some ten thousand jobs. Advanced manufacturers from General Electric Aviation and EADS' American Eurocopter in aerospace, the Russian steel giant Severstal, truck maker PACCAR and several alternative energy manufacturers have taken advantage of the state's quality workforce and business-friendly environment. They join Chevron's largest North American refinery and Huntington-Ingalls shipyard in proving manufacturing has a future not only in Mississippi, but also America.
Our Mississippi and Virginia-based GreenTech Automotive offers an example of how states and businesses can work together to get the job done. To continue this growth in other parts of the country, state governments need to recognize their role, not in being the source of jobs, but in fostering an environment conducive to job creation. They must level the playing field for competition; implement smarter tax policies that promote growth rather than punish success; invest in worker training; and promote innovation as well as the manufacturing required to make the products that result. Businesses, too, must commit to American manufacturing. They will find the risks are few. The U.S. is still home to the world's best workers and technology.
We have begun to accomplish great things in a state committed to creating a business-friendly environment by putting aside our differences and embracing Made in America as both a corporate goal and a deeply held value. Other states and other businesses should do the same.
If the US government objects, then I will have the wind driven electrical generators, blades and the towers delivered to my factory without nameplates and then they will be parts for final assembly in the USA by Americans when US citizens add only the nameplate to each of the Chinese wind driven electrical generators.
The Chinese will accept my paper US dollars and/or electronic US Dollar credits only because they can immediately buy title to privately owned businesses, factories, casinos, hotels, farms, land, ports, breweries, refineries, forests, ports, breweries and other privately owned wealth and other assets located in the USA that were created by previous US generations of US citizens prior to the de-industrialization of the USA, since these US dollars cannot be redeemed for Gold from Ft. Knox.
Only repeal of the "Free Trade" laws, environmental laws, and the other laws that ECONOMICALLY REQUIRED that US businesses to move their US factories and those associated jobs for US citizens to overseas locations and lay off all of the US employees in order to take advantage of lower labor, lower energy and lower environmental compliance costs available in foreign countries might bring those jobs back to the USA.
This might be too late, because it will also take years to rebuild our STEM educated human manufacturing technology database that was also destroyed along with our industrial base.
Were our elected congressmen ignorant, stupid, dishonest, or some combination of these factors?
How else do you think that these "FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS" were created?
Do you think that maybe the foreign product manufacturers that export consumer products to the USA might have paid professional US lobbyists to spend hundreds of thousands of US dollars on wine, food, women, song, vacations, cash, sexual services, corporate jobs for the (unemployable) children/wives/girlfriends on enough of the US senators and US congressmen (and their congressional aides who actually control the members of congress) plus campaign contributions to influence/entice (bribe) enough of our Republican and Democratic US Presidents, Congressmen and Senators for the past 20 years to create all of that "FREE TRADE AGREEMENT LEGISLATION" to ratify various trade agreements that allowed, caused, and ECONOMICALLY REQUIRED our businesses to take advantage of the lower labor costs, lower electrical energy costs, lower business taxes, lower payroll taxes to pay for health care costs, lower unemployment insurance costs, lower environmental manufacturing costs and other anti-business costs that are not required in various foreign countries with fewer anti-business laws that are/were applicable to businesses in the USA?
How do you think that US Government contracts, guaranteed (Solyndra type) loans, grants, and/or any other laws giving tax money to only a few people (campaign contributors) were created by our elected US Presidents, US congressmen, US senators, and their bureaucratic administrators?
Bribery of individual members of the US congress by Professional Lobbyists is institutionalized bribery!
How many more Taxpayer Paid for "Solyndra" type "Pay to Play" business deals did these political contributions buy as a part of our politician’s re-election campaign funds?
Bribes are not always cash in a brown paper sack. These days insider trading advice is much less obvious and harder to detect instead of cash payments.
We need to outlaw taxpayer paid congressional aides for congressmen and senators also! Let the legislators pay for the aides themselves, and/or read and study the proposed legislation themselves.
I believe that the various government taxing authorities at all levels must reduce their economic big government spending ways in order to leave something for our children besides being obligated to pay off our debts and other retirement obligations that we created to pay for our US citizen's de-industrialized, non-productive and high consuming lifestyles.
The US Government created FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS to economically require US businesses to take advantage of less expensive foreign labor, less expensive foreign electricity, and less expensive foreign environmental manufacturing costs by relocating their jobs to foreign nations.
Borrowing a lot of US Dollars back from China and then spending that money on infrastructure improvements, government employees, teachers, policemen, firemen, etc. will not create any new privately held NATIONAL WEALTH that would be available for that some of that new wealth to be CONFISCATED via taxes to repay the money that we borrowed from China!
Why should the Chinese work hard and continuously loan more and more of their US Dollars back to the de-industrialized USA to pay the bills for our lazy, carefree, easy, non-productive, government activities and our wealth consuming lifestyles?
Since 2001, when China was given full WTO status, the U.S. has lost more than 50,000 jobs per month.
50,000 jobs per month. (2)
Manufacturing is critical. For each lost manufacturing job results in 3-4 lost support job. If an auto worker is unemployed, he is unlikely to buy a house.
Tariffs penalize a company for off-shoring manufacturing. Tariffs have been a fundamental tool for promoting economic growth for hundreds of years. (3) Some incorrectly assign the 1929 Depression to tariff policy. Note that the tariff policy began two years after the beginning of the Depression. Not exactly cause and effect.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/business/global/china-response-mild-to-us-trade-complaint-on-cars.html
2. http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tariffs_in_the_United_States
President Clinton granted China the MFN (Most Favored Nation) trade status, which is very similar to a Free Trade Agreement.
He did not have to do that!
Get the money out of politics and erect meaningful tariffs.
William K. Black: Apple's Ethical Blindness Selects for Criminal Suppliers in Fraud-Friendly Nations
"...To sum it up, the Apple official who said that America does not produce the type of engineers Apple needs was speaking the truth. What we are observing is the essence of a Gresham's dynamic in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the market..."
Billions of dollars were spend on teaching math and sciences.
But today, we don't offer enough jobs in math, science, and engineering.
Only one engineering discipline mentioned in the BLS Fastest Growing Occupations out to 2020: biomedical engineer:
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_103.htm
Fastest growing occupations
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm
Most New Jobs : Occupational Outlook Handbook : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
The problem is,... the current crop of companies that mostly COULD be making products here in America, with quality American labor, adding value to raw materials an infinished goods with origin in America,...
They are so focused on saving a few pennies / unit when they get to ship the production overseas,... so that they can raise their profits that fraction over last year, so that they get their big bonuese and golden parachutes and stock options,....
That they forget what Henry Ford figured out,.... that is you pay a person enough to buy the products they are producing,.... they tend to buy them, and put money back into the economy,...and into the company producing those goods.
As to savings pennies per unit that's the way all businesses work-the key is to put a value on keeping manufacturing capabilities in our country. This can only be done with a National policy that discourages outsourcing. Germany is a good example where their industrial base is protected thru subsidies and tight products standards.
We need a farsighted and coherent energy policy that incorporates energy conservation efforts, an advanced smart power-grid, mutiple inputs from renewable and conventional energy generation sources and more.
We need a farsighted and coherent national industrial capacity building and manufacturing policy - for example at least targeted import tariffs for some goods, and a national infrastructure bank (independent of the existing corporate banks) to help fund companies and projects in the long-term industrial interest.
We need a coherent and FUNDED educational system that helps funnel talented individuals into skilled non-college positiions, and into high-tech science and engineering programs. Some sort of aprenticship program perhaps rather than just a traditional college,...
And more.
Run for your lives.