Joey
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< ------------ Some Guy ?! ..... !!!!! : https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-irrelevant-tariffs-1522881186" Trump’s Irrelevant Tariffs "
" The President won the real jobs war, which wasn’t with Mexico or Germany. " By Daniel Henninger
" A never-to-be-forgotten line that burst out of Donald Trump during the campaign was: “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.” With President Trump currently drafting much of America into his trade war with the world, we may be there.
This week, the Trump trade team and China traded $50 billion tariff salvos. A day or so earlier, Mr. Trump threatened again to end the North American Free Trade Agreement. He is sending the National Guard to the border. He threatened steel and aluminum tariffs from Europe to Asia. Pretty much the whole world is under a Trump threat, and the stock market has a new sport: 700-point cliff-diving.
Mr. Trump’s justification for brinkmanship on this scale is mostly one thing: protecting U.S. workers from unfair foreign trade and jobs displacement by immigrants.
There’s just one problem with this: The U.S. is running out of citizen workers.
Barron’s, our sister publication, just published a long article, “The Great Labor Crunch,” on the country’s acute shortage of workers in trucking, construction, retailing, fast food, oil drilling, technology and manufacturing. And that’s just a partial list.
Demographics alone predict a worker shortage of 8.2 million over the next 10 years. An oil services manager calls it “an emergency, a crisis actually.”
Earlier this week, the Journal described labor shortages across the Midwest (“Too Many Jobs, Not Enough People”). Skilled, semiskilled or unskilled labor—we’re short of everything. A sign on an Arby’s near Mason City, Iowa: “If you’re smiling, we’re hiring.”
Donald Trump wants to spend his days grinding out one-on-one renegotiations of the U.S.’s trade agreements, but he has been overtaken by his own economic success. His policies have produced the worker shortage that now makes his war on trade deficits a third-level concern.
It’s an astonishing achievement. On taking office, Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress put in motion a radical deregulation targeted at nearly every major U.S. industry and workplace. At year’s end, he and his Republican allies enacted a 40% cut in the corporate tax rate, while reforming an array of other tax-related impediments to capital investment.
In just over a year, we have full employment. The Democrats, by choice, contributed nothing to this welcome result.
Donald Trump won the real jobs war, which wasn’t with Mexico or South Korea but with the Obama presidency’s eight years of economic suppression.
Here’s another threat: With the U.S. economy now desperate for workers, what Mr. Trump is doing to limit trade and immigration means he could stop winning and start losing, because stalled worker productivity will slow rising GDP. You can’t squeeze more growth out of the turnips.
Somewhere, somehow, the U.S. needs to produce more workers.
The default solution is worker retraining. But we already have public and private retraining programs coming out of our ears. One Wisconsin manufacturer even told the Journal: “We’d rather people not have any experience because then they’re not bringing bad habits with them.”
The debate over DACA and the Dreamers has also reached the point of diminishing returns. They are a drop in the employment bucket. Put them to work and move on. Move on means rationalizing U.S. immigration policies, rather than wheel-spinning over them another 25 years.
A response equal to this peacetime worker crisis would include a modernized version of the bracero program used to cover labor shortages during World War II: Workers come in on date-limited visas, do what needs to be done, go home, and come back when needed.
U.S. agricultural producers, with unharvested crops rotting in the fields, already are moving their businesses to Mexico and elsewhere. Manufacturers that can’t find workers will also move offshore.
At no time has politics ever recognized full employment as a problem. With the Trump presidency, the moment to deal with the “problem” of full employment has arrived.
The problem is no longer that “they” are “stealing our jobs.” It is that too many rural or inner-city Americans cannot or will not migrate to the jobs employers are offering.
The idea that the American work ethic has eroded is similar to the immigration debate—interesting but going nowhere. More relevant is that after Donald Trump brought to the surface disaffected people in places such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, we learned more about the phenomenon of people who simply won’t move to take work. Why not?
It’s a long list. Because the home-mortgage deduction is too valuable and the shortage of housing (and construction workers) makes moving too expensive.
Because the vast expansion of state Medicaid and other entitlements has trapped more people into thinking that a low-grade life without work is good enough.
Because public schools leave the young semi-numerate and semi-literate. Because state occupational licensing deters millions from moving to jobs they’d be good at.
The true challenge now is not protecting U.S. workers from the rest of the world but liberating them inside their own country. "
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