Confessions of a Presidential Candidate (unemployment, health care, voting, wage)
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Whole lotta memoirs! And interesting bits about the candidates.
Confessions of a Presidential Candidate
If books were candidates, and the next President were the person who’d written the best one, the unchallenged front-runners would be Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren. (Both also wrote their own books.) Buttigieg’s “Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future” (Liveright) is the best written of all these books; it offers the most unembarrassed political hope; and it’s got the best love story.
Buttigieg’s stirring, honest, and often beautiful book is a story of how the people of South Bend rebuilt their Rust Belt city, and made it a better place, and it’s an argument for what it means to answer a calling, and why it’s important to ask, again and again, “what each of us owes to the country.”
Elizabeth Warren’s “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class” (Picador) is part memoir, part political manifesto, and it hits all kinds of nails right smack on their heads, with the hammer of a political Thor. Warren, who is not only a Massachusetts senator but also a scholar (her book has footnotes), tells the story of her life alongside the stories of other people’s lives to demonstrate how conservatives have destroyed the American middle class, like moths eating holes in your sweaters.
“Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage today is lower than it was in 1965—about 24 percent lower.” The nation’s largest employer is Walmart, which reported $14.69 billion in profits in 2015. The seven members of the family who founded the company, the Waltons, “have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together,” but Walmart’s wildly underpaid employees get by only with assistance from the federal government. Warren writes, “The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children.”
Warren writes, “The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children.”
Wal-Mart, reduces the unemployment rate of the least educated, least marketable of the workforce by creating jobs accessible to people that in some circumstances, have few to no other prospects to actually being hired and utilized by another company.
Close Wal-Mart and then what....these people are creating the next tech start-ups?
Warren's main problem isn't her capacity for work, or her intellect. It's her refusal to be bound by the scope of what she gets to decide as an elected official and confusing it with what she elects to do as a concerned citizen.
I'm more concerned about how the 9 presidents in my lifetime have all worked to undo various aspects the Glass-Steagall Act and continue to deregulate financial and investment industries that has allowed the rich to get richer while holding the rest of accountable for failures within the system.
Rebuild local economies with small businesses. Without cheap imports and cheap freights, Walmart and all the megastore chains are dust.
Easy to say, damned hard to do. The internet sales are really damping down small business growth as brick and mortar stores. And those stores are still the local sources of many small-town economies. Wal-Mart has found ways to survive the net, as have the big boys.
Trying to believe cheap imports and low freight costs will make a difference is foolish. They won't.
Consumers will need a lot more disposable income than they have right now for those 2 to make any difference at all.
Rebuild local economies with small businesses. Without cheap imports and cheap freights, Walmart and all the megastore chains are dust.
I get the point. Truly. Wal-Mart ripped through my home area like a main street killing tornado...but that was a long time ago. I still won't shop there. I rarely buy from Amazon. I do Costco because they treat their employees better...but it's the same thing really.
The problem is that...if the only thing keeping Wal-Mart down is tariffs....then we'd have a lot of people devoting time and capital to rebuilding a main street only to see is slaughtered again when the tariffs fall off again. Not just main street, but the infant industries that spring up to supply it....and the end industries that were competitive today, but now have to deal with expensive inputs.
It would be pretty tough to move towards mercantilism in this day and age. The economy is global now. Our benefit is the range of cheap of material inputs....our hope is to create a new output that's far from a commodity. Let the product cycle race, begin. That's reality.
Trump's not telling us that reality...but if you look closer at the end results, it appears the main goal is to assert fair and equal market access....not finance the country on tariffs or set new rate levels. Harder to sell to the people than TAX CHINA!...but someone on that negotiation team is a lot smarter than the President is. However, the Democrats with their push on higher costs to be magically absorbed are arguably even worse in the miscommunication. We'll see if someone will break out from the group and give us the straight dope...or the people even want it.
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