At the request of the Joint Select Committee, on October 5th, 2011 we passed them our thoughts on the Job Burden.
Eliminate the US Job Burden:
It costs more to create and
maintain private sector jobs in the US than it does in any other
country. We will continue to lose our best paying private sector jobs to the
rest of the global economy until we recognize and correct this job killing and
economy killing imbalance.
In this highly competitive
global economy, our laws, regulations, taxes and policies have made it
increasingly less profitable for employers to create jobs in America than in
other countries. The unintended consequences of these actions have been to
force investors, entrepreneurs and businesses both large and small to take
their capital and their jobs and go elsewhere, and they have – in droves. To reverse that trend and once again foster U.S. based private sector job creation,
Americans must seek out and remove the roadblocks that impede U.S. based
employer profitability. We refer to the collection of impediments that inhibit
employer profitability, and thereby restrict job creation, as the Job Burden.
We propose that America begin
her economic recovery by reversing the forty-year journey that has forced
American employers to pay for our nation’s historic social ills and economic
inequities at the expense of our jobs. The unintended consequences of these
policies have been to undermine the very business climate that was responsible
for elevating America
to lone economic superpower status and producing the highest standard of living
the world has ever known. We argue that by continuously increasing non-business
related costs on our job creators, we have forced them to take their capital
and their jobs to friendlier shores. We show that by burdening our employers
with a host of social safety-net costs, uncompetitive government regulations
and the world’s highest business tax structure, the once most job-welcoming
nation in history has deteriorated into one of the most job unfriendly counties
in the world.
We use Bureau of Labor
Statistics data to quantify several of the safety-net programs that contribute
to the U.S.
job burden. Our analysis reveals that safety-net costs such as Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, employer-based healthcare, and pension plans add 30% to the
cost of U.S.
manufacturing labor. A thirty percent labor premium is an unsustainable
handicap for American based employers to overcome in an ever-growing global
economy that continuously improves in production quality, process efficiency
and the education of its labor force. To add insult to injury; we reveal that
consumers and not businesses actually pay for these programs by way of
increased prices. The sad irony is that the increased prices merely make
American made goods less competitive, which costs us our jobs and puts our
safety net programs at risk.
While we condemn the
job-killing aspects of the job burden, we underscore the critical importance
that our safety-net programs have on American society, however; we demonstrate
that funding our safety net programs through our businesses not only destroys
our jobs but consequently places our job-funded safety-net programs at risk.
Keeping both our safety-net programs and our jobs requires an alternate means
of funding our safety-net programs. We recommend we address that dilemma
through a revenue-neutral National Retail Sales Tax that we have named the
Safety-Net Tax. The Safety-Net Tax not only frees U.S. employers from the job-killing
ravages of the job burden, but since it allows improvements to overall business
efficiency, it will reduce aggregate costs (prices + Taxes) to consumers and
taxpayers. All Job Burden costs are passed along to consumers and as such are
regressive in that the poor pay a higher percentage of their wages for
Job Burden costs then do more affluent consumers.
In any free-market economy,
profitable, private businesses are the only economic growth engine we have. The
jobs those profitable businesses produce are the most effective way for
Americans to contribute to and benefit from that growth engine. In this global
economy, American labor must unite and commit to winning the global competition
for jobs. American workers must provide employers, both foreign and domestic
with reasons to invest their capital in America
and create their jobs in America.
As a labor force, America
must structure an approach designed to entice employers to bring their jobs
here not punish them with costs and regulations that reduce their profits and
inhibit their success. American labor must assume responsibility for restoring America to the
most job friendly country in the world. Our politicians, labor unions, press
and special interest groups must unite behind this American self-interest
objective. The only way to “jobs-jobs-jobs” is to help business and capital be
more profitable here than anywhere else. Americans must demand that our
political, business and labor leadership reject the economic destructive
strategies that pit labor against business for the purposes of advancing
parochial self-serving interests.
Eliminating the Job Burden
does not mean we have to relinquish the gains made by organized labor. On the
contrary, the AUP wants to protect and even enhance the quality of work-life
gains that organized labor has achieved over the years. In fact, we want to
take it a step further. We want all Americans, not just a select few, to
benefit from the benefits and protections forged by organized labor. Our
philosophy in this regard is simple: As a nation, we can have any safety-net
program, benefit plan or quality of work-life standard we want! All we have to
do is pay for it! And, equally important, we must guard against attempts by our
politicians and special interest groups to hide or postpone the costs of our
programs in various tax and debt schemes that eventually come back to bite us
and put our nation’s financial future at risk.
What we have to do is stop
pretending that our businesses pay for any of our safety-net programs – they do
not. "There is no free lunch". We must recognize that we pay for them
as consumers, taxpayers and employees. Once we realize this fundamental
economic truth, we can free our businesses from the job burden, which will
allow business to create American based jobs as we continue to pay for our
safety-net programs through our purchases.
One way to portray private
sector job creators is to compare them to the fabled “Goose that lays the
golden eggs”. While the job creators symbolize the goose, the golden eggs
denote the jobs they create. Until we unshackle our employers from
uncompetitive, non-product related costs, the United States will continue to
hemorrhage jobs and industries to the rest of the global economy. It is a
simple formula: The more we ask our businesses to pay for our social programs
and other non-business related costs, the more jobs we will lose to foreign
competitors who are eager to keep their costs down and take our jobs. In
essence, we are purposefully killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Why?
Consider recent Congressional actions either passed into law or pending
Congressional action e.g. PPACA (Obama Care), Cap & Trade, Financial
Regulations. Each of these programs adds to the job burden and will no doubt
force more jobs overseas. The question that every American should ask is “why
is Congress killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Attempts by some in
Congress to “shame” American business leaders who outsource or relocate to less
costly shores as “un-American” are ridiculous demagoguery. By definition,
capital must follow the path of least resistance or risk being lost. It would
be a violation of a business leader’s fiduciary responsibility not to do
everything in their power to maximize the return on any owner’s capital
investment, even if that means going offshore. It is the responsibility of
Congress to ensure that investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders do not
perceive their best opportunities lie offshore. Any Congressperson who does not
understand and accept these fundamental economic truths is not qualified to set
economic policy for a country founded on free-market principles.
We conclude by asking the
President and both houses of Congress to recognize the job killing nature of
the U.S. Job Burden and to issue a “Sense of the Congress” declaration advising
the world that the United States
is committed to eliminating the U.S.
job burden and is once again open for business. The force of this simple
declaration would immediately ease the economic uncertainty holding back our
business expansion and job creation. That economic expansion and job creation
would continue provided Congress actually implements on a timely basis the
policies that eliminate the U.S. Job Burden.
Please review our plan to
eliminate the Job Burden and the rest of our economic roadmap at
http://americansunitedparty.blogspot.com/2011/07/executive-summary.html Thank
you for taking the time to read our thoughts and we wish you good luck and
great success on your journey to restore our economy.
