Want to stimulate the economy and bring jobs back? Announce that as of next month all imported goods and services are goods and services are required to be produced under the same regime of labor laws, environmental protection regulation, product safety standards, liability laws and accounting standards used by US companies. Any company that wants to sell to US markets must be accessible to US investors. Anything not meeting these standards will be subject to a tariff that will begin at 10% and escalate by 1% each month until the 200% tariff rate is reached. There's no reason why we should lose the quality of life that our parents, grandparents and the generations before them worked and fought for just because someone somewhere else can cut corners and externalize costs to make things cheaper. We are losing everything because we are compromising our standards for marginally cheaper products and service.
One major reason that health care is growing to such a huge percentage of our expenses is that it is a service that is not exportable and relies mainly on products and technologies that are highly developed and thus only come from the developed world where things are expensive. Everything is cheap in China: Goods, services and lives are all had for a pittance. If we fail to rely on our own industry in our own regime of regulation, we will ultimately reduce the value of what we own and who we are to the same level as the Chinese or the Cambodians or the Malaysians or whoever else pops up as the next country stable enough to build factories in to exploit wage slaves and ruin the local lands and seas. China has had a tremendous stimulus by sucking the money out of us for over 20 years. They will have the rest of the world to as their market and they will have most of our technology to use to continue their ascension. Without the tidal wave of money flowing from our coffers, they will have to figure out how to grow in organic, sustainable ways and how to do it without outlandishly rewarding their upper class while exploiting their lower classes. They may even decide that the one-party system isn't all it's cracked up to be. Whatever happens will be better for us and better for them. We wont have lead or cadmium infested toys and jewelry. We won't have toxic drywall, or deadly dried milk or malware-infected routers. If we don't wake up and start doing this, we're going to have to stop trying to live in a developed nation with all of the rules and regulations that we put upon ourselves because no one is going to be able to afford it. You're about to travel to the third world. Just sit back on your couch and watch the decent continue. When you go out the front door in 10 years. It will be your neighborhood. Thank you George, Bill, George and Barak.