What's It Good For?

I think the world needs both the idealists and the pragmatists, one thinks up the ideas and the other either makes them work or proves that they won't work. Sometimes, though, it isn't so much that an idea won't work, it's just that nobody thinks that it's worth the effort to put it into practice. Before anybody does anything, they first have to want to do it. Many things are interesting to contemplate, but, if nobody wants to do it, it won't get done. Then again, sometimes it's a negative motivation, you do it to evade the negative consequences of not doing it. It's like they used to tell us in the army: "We can't make you do it, but we can damn sure make you wish you did."

I think another reason the labor union movement lost a lot of momentum in our lifetimes was that all the significant gains had already been made by our predecessors. Our generation inherited all this and took it for granted. We had the vague idea that we should be trying to get more, but we couldn't agree about what specifically to try to get. Some people wanted more money, some wanted better insurance, some wanted more vacation and holiday time, and some wanted better working conditions. My paper mill colleagues didn't seem very concerned about the starving masses who still hadn't organized unions. The starving masses in Cheboygan were generally resentful of us anyway. Instead of striving to catch up with us, they wished they could bring us down to their level. There is even a term for that in our local dialect: "dog in a manger". Being a city slicker, you may not know that a manger, in addition to being a place to lay the Baby Jesus, is a box where you put hay for livestock to eat. Also, dogs like to sleep in them because of the soft warm hay. When a dog is sleeping in a manger, it prevents the livestock from eating the hay. The dog has no interest in eating the hay himself, he just won't let the other animals eat it. Therefore, a dog in a manger is a person who doesn't want something for himself, but he doesn't want anybody else to have it either. Cheboygan is full of people like that.

I know that we can't tax Red China, I just wish we could. Sure they earned their money, but so did we. If we have to pay income tax, they should have to pay income tax. Well, they probably already pay income tax to their own government, but that government already owns everything in the country. My point is that most of that money originated in the United States, and there should be a way to repatriate some of it. For about five years our central bank has been cranking out 85 billion new dollars a month. There has been some talk of them "tapering off", so I don't know what the current amount is. Where did all that money go? The economy has been slowly improving, but that might have happened anyway. Meanwhile, our government has been borrowing money from Red China, money that they wouldn't have had if we hadn't given it to them. Does that seem fair to you?

Another place that money has been going, is to Mexico and other Central American countries. The link you gave me talked about it. I don't know if illegal immigrants are good for our economy or not, but they sure are good for their own economies back home.

Okay, here's another idea that just occurred to me: How about an export tax on U.S. dollars? Ten cents of every dollar that leaves the country, for whatever reason, gets kicked back to the U.S. Treasury. They could even make it revenue neutral by paying a ten cent rebate on every dollar that comes back into the country. We can argue later about how to fairly distribute this new found wealth, but first we have to get it back into the United States where it belongs.