Economic Roadmap Summary:
The Americans United Party (AUP) released its Economic Roadmap during the summer of 2011. Their comprehensive Roadmap tackles the root causes responsible for America’s languishing economy and maps out a strategy that places America back on the path to prolonged prosperity. The Roadmap presents the strategy through a series of interrelated position papers. To help convey their message further, the AUP has encapsulated their economic strategy into the slogan: “More jobs: Less debt!”
To view the summary of their complete Economic Roadmap with links to their other economic position papers, please refer to their one page Economic Roadmap Executive Summary.
Purpose:
This position paper presents the “More Jobs” portion of our More Jobs; Less Debt economic slogan. We hope to accomplish two goals with the reader.
First, we want to convince you that the best way to create and sustain jobs is to define, identify and eliminate what we refer to as the “Job Burden.”
Second, once convinced, we ask that you contact your elected representatives and ask them to enact legislation that replaces the U.S. Job Burden with the Safety-Net Sales Tax
Executive Summary:
Our approach to the “More Jobs” portion of our economic slogan is a simple one – 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.
After defining the Job Burden, we explore some of the detrimental affects it has had on the U.S. economy and private sector job market. We then 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 market that continuously improves in production quality, process efficiency and the education of its labor force. To add insult to injury; we explain 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 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 to consumers and taxpayers.
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. 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.
Link to the rest of the position paper
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