Communism or Capitalism? Which is it to be?

Authored By Dave Webb

Obamacare is only the latest move towards our going into a communistic/socialistic state.

We have been gradually going to the Communistic side of economics for a good number of years. There are a good number of questions that need to be asked of our representatives in the Congress.

There is a valid case for a socialist type economy in today’s world. Apparently Mr. Romney’s 47% people on welfare is alarming to a lot of us. The problem I have with it is qualifications. In order to qualify, you have to be practically bankrupt. Or you have to stay below a certain income level to qualify.

Even the VA Hospitals have put income qualifications in place by President Bush’s executive orders. Those orders are still in effect years after he is out of office. I find this to be a national disgrace. No other country in the world has such a system of penalizing people who risked their lives because they happened to be successful in civilian life. But we do a lot of thiings like penalizing people for making a living.

More and more, medical bills are the reason people are on welfare. A kid goes in the hospital for six weeks. In order to save him, the family goes bankrupt. The cost of a hospital is enormous.

A lot of the time it is simply people out of work that can not longer find work. This is a nightmare. You lose everything you own, and basically you are at the mercy of a bunch of government bureaucrats for your ability to even have shelter, food, and transportation. After they go through all their unemployment benefits it is a short trip to the welfare line. In the meantime, they lose the house they had always dreamed of. They are qualified to only own a car worth less than $2,000.

Many people in the last few years have gone through this nightmare of financial ruin. We have a number of causes. Most of these causes can be traced back to our government. The government has actually made it easy for companies to take their employment needs to places like India, China, and Mexico. I just saw 18 graphic artist jobs shipped to India. Some had worked at this place for 20 years. It is a public newspaper with supposedly pro labor policies. Well, maybe when the original owners were there. It is now owned by third generation rich people.

The basic survival of our form of government is dependent on income taxes. The average worker is responsible for our money that pays for our government. So why is the average worker in jeopardy?

I think it is the rules laid down by government in which corporations operate. If it wasn’t profitable to take those jobs overseas they wouldn’t do it. We have international agreements put together by Bush Senior and signed into law by Clinton. Ross Perot said it best. That vacuum sound you hear is our jobs being shipped overseas. (Not an exact quote.)

We had a similar thing happen in the 1920s. Only then it was a fracture in the need for skilled labor versus unskilled labor. Thousands of skilled laborers lost their jobs when the assembly line made putting complicated products together with cheap labor. Each laborer only had to remember to do one task. I maintain that loss of income caused the Great Depression of the 30s. There were a lot of other causes including what we now think of as fraud in the stock market.

The current assembly line came to an end with the invention of Robotics and sophisticated computers. What used to take 30 people to produce can be done with a lot less people.

Computers have made a lot of service jobs go overseas thanks to internet communications. Computers put the entire printing industry out of business when they went from metal type to printing on a page. I was there. I know.

3-d Printing will soon make even China obsolete. 3-d Printing will change the industrial world in a very short time. Tooling a new product just became possible at a fraction of the cost it would have been just a few years ago. A model can produced at a fraction of the cost it used to take.

All of these changes are producing a vacuum. The vacuum is our jobs. We need those jobs in order to survive. When a diver comes up from the depths too fast, that person gets the bends. It is very painful. We are making just such an adjustment in the modern world. The last time it caused a revolution in social benefits provided by the government to keep people going. Things like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and later on, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, and things like income qualification.

The result is a huge government bureaucracy supporting a large population of people that do not produce anything. That system does not work.

The government is dependent as well. They are dependent on people working for a living and paying their taxes. Without those people paying their taxes, the accumulative effect is a government going broke. This didn’t happen yesterday. It has been a progressive thing since the end of the Vietnam War and Linden Johnson’s social programs. The difference is that now we do not have the work force to support these programs.

The tax laws are unequal. They are basically unconstitutional. This is the problem faced by our courts.

For instance: We have people engaged in illegal occupations. Such as a prostitute working the streets at $200 a client. They are arrested over and over again. A lot are on expensive drugs. So how come they are not come to grief with the IRS? I guess Proof is everything. They are not brought before the IRS because they have no visible income. They are eligible for all kinds of welfare because technically that income doesn’t exist. The message from our government is it is stupid to work. If we declare the IRS unconstitutional the entire house of cards comes down around our heads. The government is dependent on those taxes.

I do not deny that we need a backup plan for people that cannot find work. Maybe welfare is the wrong way to go. The sensible thing for our government is to figure out how to put those people back in the work force. We need people paying taxes.

I propose that we need a very strong program that will put these people back in the working world. That means retraining. It means a communistic program. It means we need to find a way to soften the future shock of new technology. We need to examine why we are allowing corporations to leave our shores. Why we are allowing them to ship our jobs overseas. Who in our government is getting paid off to allow this to happen?

I maintain we need to pay people to train in new technologies and get good paying jobs in industry. That means a different kind of welfare. This welfare enables people to go back to work. Other countries are doing this. I know people that have had a living wage while they go through scholarships to learn Electrical Engineering in colleges. They are from other countries we are supporting with foreign aid.

We need to disable the IRS program against small businesses. I think we need to nurture small business instead. They employ a lot of people if we let them. It shouldn’t need an office full of accountants to stay legal with the IRS.

The biggest problem with the IRS is it leans towards helping big businesses and goes after small businesses far too much. The small businesses cannot hire lawyers to keep them out of trouble.

The biggest constitutional problem with the IRS is how complicated it is. It has to be simple enough for the average person to understand. Right now if you asked 10 IRS agents a question, you might get six different answers. That is plain wrong. It needs to change. That is why it is on shaky legal ground.

I want to make it unfeasible to hire people abroad to do jobs that are ours. I think the Congress needs to fill in the blanks on what that entails. \Every job sent to India means no one is paying income taxes here. In order to do business here, they have to pay their dues. That means we have to have laws that make the companies pay taxes on what it would cost to hire someone here. If you are paying $1 an hour in India or China then you have to pay minimum wage taxes here. You have to pay Social Security taxes on those people as well. If you were paying someone $30,000 a year to do the same job here, then you owe taxes on those wages whether you employ them or not.

My question to all you congress people out there is simple: Do you like to eat? Do you enjoy your high wages and benefits? Then you need to quit making rules that push jobs away from our shores. We have to have a decent living wage for the majority of the people that work and support the government.

There are a lot of stupid game rules out there right now.

We have to turn those rules around to have a thriving economy.

You have a choice. You can have a parasite for a government or you can have a symbiotic relationship with our government. The later choice means the government has to come to the aid of the common people and put them back to work. Even if that entails a certain amount of social responsibility for the people that eventually support our government with taxes.

47% is too large a number of people out of work.