Your Tax Dollars at Play

One of the many hilarious Republican talking points is that the private sector spends money more effectively than the government. Every corporation on the New York Stock Exchange disproves that argument on a minutely basis. [If you want a dramatic example, read William Cohen’s Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.] If you can find a single CEO whose salary makes a lick of sense, you’re probably trying to bullshit yourself and me. No government office is arrogant enough to pay anyone millions of dollars for squatting in a corner office making foolish decisions. In fact, the biggest abuses of government funds are consistently when the government farms out work to the private sector. Private business can’t seem to do anything without doing it badly, other than cobbling together harmless or harmful and unnecessary widgets and toys; like assault weapons.

Idle billionaire playboy Jeff Bezos just launched his latest toy, a roughly half-billion-dollar megayacht that pretty much flaunts how much excess cash the boy has to flaunt. It is a “sailing yacht,” which means he has the time to let the wind blow him to his luxury destinations. At 417 feet/127m, Bezos’ “Koru” is the world’s largest sailing yacht equipped with three masts, an on-deck pool and a mermaid on the bow that looks like his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez.

Bezos isn’t risking his precious time to the winds of fate, though. He also has a $75M Damen Yachting “butler boat,” the Abeona, a 246-foot support vessel toting the “toys” — the ATVs, supercars, seaplanes, motorcycles, smaller boats, scuba gear, personal submarines, and a helicopter hangar—and a 45 person crew to make sure Jeffy and his bimbo don’t have to lift a finger or sully their presence sleeping in the vicinity of minions. The $75M Abeona is a motorized yacht and has the range to go anywhere Bezos might want to travel on a single “tank” of gas.       

At the moment, the world seems to be gorging on mindless and useless billionaires. As of April, Forbes Magazine says there are 2,640 billionaires in the world and they have hoarded at least $12.2 trillion and the USA has spewed 735 of those useless, money-grubbing, corporate-welfare morons across the planet.

Check out the comments on the NYT link above. Nitwits and asskissers said servile things like “Amazon is akin to the automobile. He deserves it. The fact that it drives the less accomplished to deep green envy is just an added bonus.” What could a person do to “earn” $125 billion dollars? What did Bezos do to “deserve” even a few million, let alone billions? What kind of work could possibly be worth that hourly wage? People who save lives for a living aren’t even in that economic territory. The President of the United States receives a $400,000 annual salary. Bezos, like every other rich asshole on the planet, was simply lucky, took advantage of the national infrastructure (transportation, digital and physical communications systems, business regulations, Republican income tax protection, and other semi-legal systems) that he in no way paid for, and put his money to work with Trump to reduce his tax obligations to near-zero. You might call that “smart” (Trump does.), but I’d call it treasonous and good reason to nationalize Amazon and put Bezos on that damn boat for life as an international criminal.

Yeah, lucky. Like Musk, Gates, and 99% of the billionaire élite, Bezos was a rich kid, spoiled and sent to the best schools anyone could afford, and had his success handed to him on a platter that even fool couldn’t miss picking up. Reagan trashing “unearned income” made it so that goobers like Bezos could hide his income through stock that he bestowed on himself as CEO and Chairman of the Amazon board of directors. If you don’t think Bezos’ parents were rich, explain how they were able to loan him US$245,000 in 1995 (equivalent to $477,134.28 in 2023) for an on-line bookstore? Who had a family that could cough up that kind of money in 1995, especially after putting him through a pair of degrees at Princeton? While he can make a bullshit claim to growing up with a single parent, his maternal grandparents had money and they generously handed it down to his step-father and mother. He couldn’t even find an original name for his company and stole “Amazon” from a Minneapolis lesbian-owned bookstore.

The Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II/Trump “elections” (two of which were anointments, not elections, since Bush II and Trump lost the popular vote) proved that you can fool almost half of the voters all of the time. None of the “tax cuts” enacted by any Republican have made a nickel’s difference to working people, but they keep hoping it might. Dribble-down has been all negative for us, though. Political economists David Hope and Julian Limberg studied the effects of “tax cuts for the rich” and summarized their study with “We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of over 0.7 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect holds in both the short and medium term. Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short- and medium-term.” Since the rich get that way from extracting value and resources from labor and national treasure (including natural resources), worrying about their luxury and opulence makes no sense from the perspective of the 99%. But that is exactly what Republicans are selling to The Marching Morons.

Trump’s acting budget director (talk about ultimate oxymorons) Russ Vought, said “It’s not that Americans are taxed too little, it’s that Washington spends too much.”  The world is awash in billionaires buying half-billion dollar yachts, building mansions all over the planet, and hoarding more money than most national budgets and these goobers think they need more? Heather Cox Richards, who provides a consistently brilliant analysis of the current political nonsense, wrote, “A 2020 study by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation showed that the changing economic distribution systems of the past forty years have moved a staggering $50 trillion upward, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans. (The national debt is currently about $31.5 trillion.)” So much for rational spending from the “private sector.”

If you suspect that I harbor nothing but ill-will toward Jeffy and billionaires and multi-millionaires in general, you are not particularly perceptive. I am a firm believer in the thought behind Aerosmith’s “Eat the Rich” and one of my favorite dreams is driving to work one morning seeing assholes in custom tailored suits hanging from every telephone pole the whole way to downtown St. Paul. The first thing I thought of when I read about Bezos’ boat was hoping for a spontaneous hurricane to sink him and everyone he knows in the deepest part of the ocean and the second was wondering if we could take up a collection to pay China to torpedo the damn thing. Maybe he could invite his butt-buddies Musk and DeSantis to do their interview on the boat during hurricane season?

Making 'Merica Great "Again"

Aside from the Trumpetes’ foolish jabber about turning back the clock on technology, trade, energy and natural resources, employment and management skills, and reality, I think an examination of what it would take to return our economy from a deficit to a surplus system is an interesting idea. Of course, Republicans deserve massive credit for driving the economy deep into deficit spending: Reagan and Bush II were both huge deficit spending believers. In spite of their big talk about the terror of deficit spending, Republicans absolutely rebelled when Obama told them he expected future spending bills to be on a “pay as you go basis.” The Party of Stupid is also the party of “borrow and spend” and nothing is going to change that in any foreseeable future.

 

However, if we did suddenly become responsible and decide to put on our big boy pants and do the dirty work of turning around the economy, what would we do? This is my list, in order of importance:

1. Money and politics has to go. Not only does Citizens United need to be overturned, but we need a Constitutional Amendment banning private money (corporate and individual) from our political campaigns. That law needs teeth, as in “you get caught, you hang.” We won’t seriously look at any real solutions until our government is not bought and sold on a daily basis.
2. The tax system has to be fixed. We’ve been at “war” since 2003 and the only way to pay for wars is to progressively tax income until the war debt is gone. I can see how eliminating the corporate tax could be incentive for business in the US, but that has to be coupled with doubling-down on unearned income taxation, inheritance taxes, and upper-income tax rates. Continuing to encourage rock stars and athletes, banksters and money laundering, and Trump-like con artists with tax incentives to do unproductive money-shuffling has cost the country at least two generations of scientists, engineers, and people who could be doing actual work. Incentives are everything and our current tax system provides incentives for exactly the wrong things; including activities that endanger national security.
3. The world is on the metric system and the longer we put off moving to modern weights and measurements the less competitive American companies and workers become. Face it, nobody but us cares about the length of the King’s fuckin’ foot. If you think that is an exaggeration, the only non-metric countries in the world are: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Talk about being late to the party! Thomas Jefferson was the first President to recommend the metric system and we still can’t figure it out. Not being comfortable with the world’s weights and measurements puts a serious crimp in the abilities of American workers, technicians, and engineers. It makes many of our manufactured products useless to the rest of the world. Constantly doing mental or paper/computer conversions slows us down, creates errors, and makes Americans look backward and foolish to the rest of the world.
4. The current slow death of religion has to speed up. Currently, about 18% of people 60 and younger attend church and fewer than 50% believe in God. That's an improvement over the past 50 years of superstition, but not enough and not nearly quick enough. Every thing from science, energy production, employability, democracy, to national security is being damaged by our national proclivity toward superstition and fantasy. To keep up, we’ll have to grow up.
5. The war machine and military-industrial complex have to go. Not only do we have to quit pretending we're the world's policeman, we have to admit we suck at the job. We can't tell national security from corporate interests and until we can we need to put our weapons back on the shelf. The US loves war, but we can't afford it. As a peace-keeper, we’re not that talented.
6. Our public education system needs to be overhauled. First, private education needs to die. When the wealthy can abandon public education and do everything in their power to contaminate the discussion about how to educate the whole country to benefit their class, the whole country gets screwed. Finland provides us with a terrific example and, since our own experiment has been a disaster, we need to look to someone who has built a wheel that actually turns and supports weight. As Jeff Beck said, “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal.” We need to rip the pages out of Finland’s education reform book and paste them into our own system.
7. We have to go back into space. The brief moment when 'Merica was great by almost everyone's standards was when we were in the Space Race and were focused on a big accomplishment. The scientific and industrial spin-offs from NASA were incredible. We owe much of what we know today about climate change to NASA's research. As crippled as our industrial and scientific power is today, without the space race we'd be 3rd world. This is a no-brainer.
8. Every “for profit” industry in the country needs to be re-evaluated to see if it is working better than when those activities were performed by non-profits and government. Personally, I think deregulation and privatization has been a disaster, but I have not made a scientific study of every area where it has been applied. I have been upfront and close to education, health care, energy, and infrastructure and I am unimpressed with the performance of the private sector.
9. Our legal system needs to get over its power tripping and empire building and develop a sense of proportion. Police need to go after big crime and quit screwing around with the easy and safe stuff. Victimless crimes do not belong at the top of the priority list. The War on Drugs was a fraud and it’s long past time to admit it. The big money and long-term damage to society is in white collar crime and that’s where the main enforcement and prosecution focus needs to be: cybercrime, financial fraud, corporate environmental and consumer abuse, and the government contracting corruption and bribery that risks national security. Our prison system needs to be refocused on rehabilitation rather than punishment and revenge. We can not be the country that leads in citizens incarcerated and hope to be anything resembling “great.” National, state, and local police departments are over-staffed with unskilled goons who are great at beating up protestors, jailing small-time criminals, and protecting corporate criminals, but they are helpless when it comes to tracking down the lowest-level hacker who has ripped off a few thousand retirees bank accounts. Our law enforcement system needs to be updated and technological to get the right job done. Use the Pareto principle to identify the most effective places to spend time and money and quit knee-jerk reacting to squeaky wheels.

That’s my list. What have you got?

#172 Conservation, Conservatives, and Our "Children's Children"

Theodore Roosevelt reminded United States' citizens that, "We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages." Roosevelt was an enlightened conservative of the last century. Today, there appears to be no such animal in politics, particularly in Republican politics. Roosevelt took pride in knowing that he created the National Park System, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and more than a dozen national forests. His opinion of wilderness was "You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it--keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all those who come after you."

Modern conservatives--more accurately described as right wing radicals--think they know better than did Roosevelt, nature, and even their gods. They believe they know when the world is going to end, since they are actively taking a hand in bringing on that end, and have no worries about the futures of their "children's children." They hope no such generation comes to be. Under the same delusions that allows radical Muslims to send their children off to school with a bomb strapped to their chests, Christian Conservatives are happily sacrificing the future of their children out of primitave superstition. The craziest of these radicals hope for a Rapture followed by Armageddon and have taken their gross biblical misreading and lack of historical context to new superstitious depths. The more common cynical right wing radicals are the basest of humans, without a care for their fellow citizens, let alone future generations. They just want to be as rich and powerful as possible without regard for future generations.

Teddy Roosevelt was, by no means, a far-seeing, futurist, but by today's poor standard of leadership he seems so. Roosevelt warned the nation that "We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time." Roosevelt promoted and protected the nation's natural resources, he tried to contain the period's huge (for the time) corporate trade-restraint conspiracies, and he occasionally used the military to preserve world peace and stability. At the time, many thought that Roosevelt was a radical imperialistic militarist, but he started no wars, acted as a neutral arbitrator to resolve at least three foreign wars and revolutions, and used the build-up of the United States' navy to offset and balance the other world naval powers, particularly Germany and Japan. By today's poor standard of leadership, Roosevelt looks idealistic and farseeing.

The thing that Roosevelt and many of us know is that the banking class has no national loyalty. Their pledge is to money, not society. Money is, regardless of the claims made on its paper, not patriotic and flows as easily into one country as another. Today's powerful ownership class is completely aware of the long-term damage they have done to this country and they could not care less. If things get bad enough here, they can always move to one of their financial islands. If they completely destroy the US economy, there is always someplace where money is unashamedly welcomed and where cold cash can buy the luxuries and power they crave. To the rich, one location is as good as another until they completely spoil one so that is no longer true. Again, Roosevelt referred to them as "the most dangerous members of the criminal class--the criminals of great wealth." Today's radical right is controlled by the "criminals of great wealth" and their expressed "moral" motives are nothing but a mask for their real purposes; the pillaging of the national treasury.

As a nation, we're experiencing record movement of money. Canada has been flooded with US speculation, to the point that Canadians are reconsidering foreign ownership of Canadian property. Unencumbered by the conservative Canadian fear of speculation, Mexico is experiencing a similar invasion of US wealth. Even popular media and literature off-handedly refers to the "off-shore bank" account anytime anyone with money wants to escape taxes, financial responsibility, or insists on economic security. The last place a truly rich person would put hard cash is in a US financial institution.

Technical skills are leaving the US, also. While US companies and the leisure class are politicking for cheap immigrant labor, they are alienating the most skilled graduates of our technical schools. Of course, we're not losing any lawyers or MBAs, no one else would have them, but we are losing scientists, engineers, and manufacturing skills. These talents are the tools the nation will need to build the future.

It's important to remember that "the rich are different from the rest of us, they have money." In other words, the wealthy aren't particularly intelligent, creative, or insightful, they are simply lucky. They are, often, as dumb as Paris Hilton and as foolish. Business trusts have been terrible creations in the history of US business. While the rich who own and control those illegal collaborations have done well, personally, the businesses they have controlled have suffered. Their selfish interests are always short-term and short-sighted. Luck of birth doesn't always mean luck in life. Many of the inherited rich have found ways to squander their wealth and power, aimlessly and pointlessly. An incredible few actually intentionally spend their unearned wealth attempting to improve the country that provided that opportunity. The majority hire intelligent employees to manage their trust funds, inheritances, business and political interests. Those employees soon join the wealthy class and begin their own decay process.

TR campaigned for an aggressive inheritance tax, a social security system, unemployment insurance, an employers' liability law, natural resources conservation, and many other social reforms to protect the nation from the "criminal class." Those criminals were largely successful in subverting the Congress of their day, preventing Roosevelt from forcing them to participate in the democracy from which their wealth was derived. Today's Congress is an even cheaper purchase for the ruling class, but at least we can actually vote the bums out of office. In 1908, the Senate was "elected" by state governors, not by popular vote.

Every generation has its collection of "canaries in the mine" who warn that critical times lay ahead. Almost every generation has suffered critical times that could have been avoided if they had paid attention to their warning signs. The balance of world power is shifting away from the United States. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it will be if we allow the idle rich to squander the nation's resources in a generation or two.

July  2007

#99 Special Interests and Growth (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Every time an area experiences an economic boom, property taxes rise.  Why is that?  Isn’t it  logical to expect the growth to pay for itself?  If the growth is really a good thing for everyone who lives in an area, you would think that would be reflected in lower taxes, not higher.  The addition of buildings to undeveloped land increases the value of the land and should return higher income to the county and state.  Farm land earns a lower tax rate than developed land.  But it never seems to work this way.  Why?  Maybe it’s because disguised special interests are calling the shots and diverting the costs of growth to people who shouldn’t have to pay it.

In the case of public funds and area growth, special interests abound.  Everyone who gains from an increase in the tax base is a special interest.  The obvious special interests, and rightly so, are developers, contractors, and real estate salespeople.  This group has a lot to gain from conning the public into paying for their investments. They would love to spread the cost of schools, roads, utilities, and other public services over the entire taxpaying population.  If those costs were borne by the people who reap the most benefit, the cost of housing would limit their profit margins and slow growth considerably.  They can always be counted on to contribute funding for a bond issue’s advertising. 

But these easy targets aren’t the only people who gain disproportionately from growth.  The two elements of greed, power and money, can help identify those who will gain from growth and, even, overpopulation.  Government officials can expect open paths to promotion, increased income, and larger “empires” through population growth.  It’s pretty obvious that a mayor of a 10,000 population town is going to make a lot less than Randy ("I can't remember who my date was") Kelly.  Kelly probably has more bodyguards than many towns have employees.  Empires are built on employees.  Salaries are based on the number of people supervised and complexity of the managed facilities.  This may also be where a big part of this exponential cost of growth comes from, too.  Large cities are not as efficient as small cities.  Large cities have more employees per taxpayer, more expense per employee, and some expenses that a small town wouldn’t even consider.  If this is what growth brings, who needs it?

If you expect government officials to present an unbiased opinion of the value of growth to the average citizen, you probably wouldn’t be skeptical of Mike Tyson’s intention toward your daughter.  Growth simply presents too much to gain for people whose income and power is based on taxation and population.  You can’t expect people to resist the temptation to look for only the upside of an issue that will dramatically and positively effect their pocketbooks. 

The rule in solving crime is “follow the money.”  This rule applies to finding the special interests who might commit the crime of destroying a community for the sake of growth.  Using this formula, it is clear that it will be difficult to accept a local newspaper as an unbiased source of information, also.  School system administrators are going to be in line for salary increases relative to the size of the schools they administer, also.  Even the police department may be pro-growth for the same reasons, although the officer on the beat will have to deal with more crime and more corruption, the department administrators will make more money and gain more power. 

When growth is a good thing, the gain is spread around equally and it is in everyone’s interest to promote it.  When growth is a bad thing, the majority of people who are asked to pay for it don’t gain proportionally to their investment; or they lose with no voice in that investment, which is what Amendment I was intended to stop.  When taxes must be raised to subsidize growth, that growth isn’t paying for itself.  The people who are reaping the largest rewards are paying only a small portion of the total investment.  When the growth produces more government jobs, it isn’t really doing the community a favor.  Someone will have to produce something real to pay for those government jobs.  When the major investors in the area don’t live in the area, the lion’s share of the benefits don’t return to the community that has paid for those resources.  Putting profits into national and international corporations’ won’t return a reasonable payback, on a long term basis.  It isn’t selfish to expect a fair return on your tax investment.  If the local government hasn’t done a good job with its funding in the past, nothing about new funding will change the people who spend it.  If you won’t get that return-on-investment, don’t spend the money. 

One way to estimate which side of an issue is not looking out for your best interests is to look at the quality of the flyers you receive.  The better they look, the better that side of the cause is financed, and you know good causes aren’t often well financed.  Money seems to flow downhill, ethically speaking, and grassroots movements don’t get much of it.  The best way to determine where your interests stand is to get involved.  Find out how your money is spent.  Learn to read budgets and force government officials to make those budgets available to taxpayers.  There is no reason why cities and states can’t follow the Clinton administration’s lead in making complete budgets available in electronic format.  That would minimize the cost of publishing these documents and allow the public to assist in analyzing the cost of government.  The more we know, the better we can run our country, cities, and neighborhoods.  If we care, the people who work for us in government will care.  If we don’t, we deserve the government we get.

September 2004

Creating Power, Creating Community

My wife and I attended an event at a small St. Paul Library last night. This was an old Carnegie library building in one of the older parts of the city, so it's one of the many libraries on the Ramsey Country Library Board's chopping block. This old library reminded me of the primary purpose of public libraries; creating communities.

This local library has been, obviously, starved for resources, but it still keeps attracting neighbors and serving the local community. In fact, the only way to stop a library like this from being used is to close its doors.

This community-building value is a purpose that modern politicians have either forgotten or one that they oppose. It's hard to tell which. For example, our local library politicians are creating a monolith of a library that will be a monument to government excess and community consolidation. When it's finished, the new Roseville Library will suck resources from every other Ramsey County Library until the library board begins to close those small libraries to make room in the budget for the one-and-only-library the country will be able to afford to keep open. Ramsey County is following the incompetent example of Minneapolis, because that's what mismanagement does. One mistake deserves another.

All of this is a good thing for the overpaid, underworked, completely useless bureaucrats who mismanage the country's resources. A giant building means giant management salaries, which means larger salaries for the politicians who mismanage the bureaucrats, which means higher taxes, which means a more stressed, less connected community, which continues the cycle of abuse and incompetence.

As in the business world, the word "leadership" has lost all meaning in government. Conservative characters like Pawlenty gabber about "responsible government" while building monuments to bureaucratic incompetence as fast as they can borrow the money to do so. Their only concern is packing the pockets of their supporters and themselves, while doing as much damage to communities as possible. The weaker, the less informed, the less educated the voters are, the easier they are to mislead. Shredding the value of public libraries to local communities is just part of this tactic.

In a few years, when the United States becomes a minor world power, broke and stagnate and paralyzed by incompetence and politics, the rest of the world will study how we came to such a low state and wonder how anyone could have not anticipated this future. The route from superpower to disaster zone is one of history's most repeated stories. Here we go again.

#198 Our Immigration Anti-Policy

The MSM talking head goofballs are shrieking about an Afghan terrorist cell discovered in Colorado. We're all supposed to be upset about the fact that a collection of Islamic refugees from a conservative loony bin have turned out to be crazy enough to be building bombs and planning mass murder in American cities. If that surprises you, you are exactly the 8-year-old intellectual capacity market the MSM caters to.

The rest of us should be asking, "Why are we still importing Afghan immigrants?"

We're at war with Afghanistan. We didn't import German immigrants during WWI or WWII. We didn't go out of our want to welcome Russian or East German immigrants during the Cold War. Why the hell is our dumbass government even considering immigration applications from Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Russians, Saudis, North Koreans, most of Africa, South America, or any of the places that routinely rant about "evil Americans?" It's not like we need their unemployed, unskilled, uneducated rejects. It's not like the "diversity" they bring to the United States provides the country with anything that will even support itself.

As crazy as it may seem, the United States, like practically every other country on the planet is overpopulated. While Americans have been making something of an effort to control family size, our idiot government has been making up for the "shortage" in idiots-being-born by ramping up immigration from the underclasses of the world. Bush/Cheney saw the Mexican boards swung wide open and more than 20 million illegals poured into and through our southern states during those brain-dead 8 years. If you had the feeling that the national IQ has been dropping in recent years, you might look to the Nation of Babble conditions our school systems are dealing with as the requirements for ESL classes overwhelms those facilities. You can't spend a lot of time on math and science when half of the classroom can't read or write the common language.

For an established nation, immigration should be a tool to temporarily obtain needed skills, technology, and innovation. We don't need more Section 8 "renters" or more Food Stamp consumers. There is a surplus of unprofitable shopkeepers in the inner city. Importing more minimum wage grunts than the economy can employ or moderate-skill workers intended to keep labor prices down is treasonous. We don't need to import intelligent, motivated students to compensate for the fact that our children are drawn to menial "creative" jobs because our corporations and factories are mismanaged by a pack of idiot MBAs who couldn't properly organize a dozen eggs. Like most every other country in the world, instead of exporting discontents or importing the same we need to fix our economy, education system, democracy, and political system before we arrogantly head off to build some other nation.

Yeah, I know, isolationist. I can live with that. I'd rather be isolationist than imperialist. It's hard to create vicious enemies when you are minding your own business.

Our current tax system was designed by idiots who shouldn't be allowed near sharp pencils. A rational system would be rewarding innovation, education, ecologically and economically friendly activities and making the opposite of those activities pay its own way. Our current system rewards speculators, the worst of all economic activities, and punishes innovation. Our system has been designed to protect the least useful of our giant and inefficient corporations--banking and finance--and to repress every industry that has a fighting chance at turning an honest profit.

Where our best companies get hit the hardest is in the talent they can find from our own citizens. Eight years of "No Child Left with a Mind" has decimated the talent pool and it will take at least that long to fix that mess. Fixing the education system could be financed by revising the tax system to encourage corporations to reward employees who upgrade their skills and by removing any corporate tax deductions for salaries and other perks over $100,000. Companies that attract people who are only motivated by money are only hiring mercenaries who will rape and pillage the business as quickly as they would leave for the next company that is foolish enough to hire them. The reward for that kind of stupidity ought to be a rational tax system that discourages idiot activities.

Instead of trying to fill the holes in the workforce with untrained, unskilled, and uneducated immigrants, our policy ought to be one that aims for quality not quantity, with a core desire to improve our own citizens' lives first.