Elections
Like everybody else, I'm tired of all the negative ads about the election. I wish people were more positive. I also wish they were more honest. Republicans seem to say across the board that they will lower taxes and create jobs. This is the Reaganomics that I thought had been proven wrong during the 2001 Technology Crash and later during the 2006 Real Estate Crash. I understand that less taxes theoretically means more money for companies to hire workers. Does anybody believe that it actually works that way, though? After all, the economy is a zero-sum game.
Here is some food-for-thought. Employers want to replace American workers with robots and foreigners who can create products for lower labor costs. In this vein, there is heavy competition to keep wages as low as possible.
Meanwhile, there are two ballot questions in my state next week related to lowering the Sales Tax. One repeals the sales tax on alcohol because a certain nearby state doesn't have any taxes on alcohol. Apparently our state is losing Billions of dollars of revenue due to fierce competition with that other state. The other ballot question would cut the sales tax for everything else from 6.25% to 3%. Again... zero-sum game. If these taxes go down then others will find a way to creep upward during the next few years. So-and-so state like New Hampshire doesn't have any income tax but they have some of the highest property taxes in the country. I don't know of any big companies besides Oracle Corporation or BAE Systems who are major employers in New Hampshire to let the states residents take advantage of the favorable income taxes. Anyway, my impression is that government has cut back as much as it could during the past two years so lowering taxes will not have the desired impact of forcing the people who run things to trim their budgets. The budgets will just look elsewhere for the money they need.
Let's get back to the many problem with the economy, which is creating jobs. The problem with America is that there aren't enough skilled workers. Or rather, there are too many people who don't have any skills. This is an issue with education. Americans aren't being educated to have the skills needed to compete in the 21st century. Therefore, I'd say that the best thing a politician could do to create jobs is to improve elementary and primary schools by increasing there funds that have (to my knowledge) been flat for the last year or two. Meanwhile, lowering taxes doesn't improve schools and create a greater quantity of skilled workers.