Exactly right. It's the logical end result of austerity (tax cuts bring in revenue! wink wink) creating the need for more austerity (look at that deficit! Tax-cut Tinkerbell sez you didn't clap hard enough, so no medicare for you.) At some point, cheap labor becomes free labor, then eventually employment as charity. You're lucky that Wal Mart gives you some way to occupy your time.

What's the plan for imports?

Everyone... get out your Thumper Decoder Rings!

How about to collect a welfare check you have to work one day a week in the fields. The Farmers will get free labor that they already pay for with their taxes and the people on the dole getting their welfare check actually have to do something to earn it.

“There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”
Henry Ford

Why? Fordism. In a Fordist system the worker is paid relatively high wages in order to buy in large quantity the products turned out in mass production. In an economy that is driven by consumerism, this is critical to keep the economy going and growing. Until we get back to having the one, we won't have the other.

That's why I'm pro-union. During the decades with the highest percentage of union membership, the economy, especially the middle-class, thrived. The economy has been falling ever since union membership started falling.

And the top 1% and 0.1% were doing mighty fine, too. In spite of the fact that the graduated income tax levels were at their highest historical levels of around 90%. Nobody was turning down raises/profits because of the tax load.

In January minimum wage in Washington goes above $9 an hour. Texas has a minimum wage of $7.25 which happens to be the federal minimum wage. Florida is $7.31. California is only $8.

Our brain trust in Washington DC decided that free trade was the answer which put us in competition with Mexico whose minimum wage is less than a dollar an hour and who is not even the lowest minimum wage of our competitors but they are the closest geographically.

Annual income in the 183 countries and regions in the world is approximately US $6,078, while China’s is only US $896. Just take the federal minimum wage and we are over $15,000 a year.

It is up to the American consumer, the Canadian consumer, the European consumer to buy the more expensive products from those countries with the higher standards of living if we want to work and pay those higher wages. You know the real story there. Whatever is cheapest sells, no other considerations.

So, please take your capitalism over labor argument to a real level and tell us how we put people to work. I personally would like to see everybody earn $100,000 a year but I cannot make sense of that when our biggest competition, China, makes less than a $1,000.

Why can't our unemployed workers find jobs and what realistically can we do about getting them work?

There's some high octane irony.

Let's use Michelle Bachmann as an example. Her farm has been given $260,000 in federal farm aid welfare, which they received for doing nothing.

So, setting aside the issue that since her farm is getting subsidies, which suggests that they produce a big crop of nothing, how many welfare recipients has that farm financed?

Realistically? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Half of government is run by people who consider their fate directly tied to the misery index. The other half are afraid of doing anything that fox news will make fun of or will alienate their donors.

There's no political will to do anything that works. "The people" are only background noise, only of concern to the extent that their donors might be distracted by them.

In the longer term, we can help to create that political will by supporting the OWS folks. It needs to be more than background noise. If they are loud enough, we might be amazed at how the politically impossible becomes inevitable.

Would NRA, WPA, CCC, Social Security or the New Deal have been possible in 1928? Less than 10 years later it was law.

The Arab uprisings could be the key. We have to make noise. Some of us will shed blood just like in the labor movement. But, when the political will returns, what do we do?

Taking from the rich will only go so far. That is just an easy observation that there are unfair differences. Straightening out taxes will not solve everything either.

We picked a world economy over doing what was right for us. We got cheap prices by taking advantage of cheap labor which cost jobs here and we have become addicted to these things. We have a healthcare cost crisis that half of us think is because of big business and half of us think is because the government meddled with medicare and laws that required heaps of paperwork (both are right, in my opinion). We punted costs down the road and they finally have caught up with us. We think we are the world's police force and the world has grown to depend on us.

All these problems and more, all fueled by short sighted political will in our history.

Those genies are out of their bottle. If it were just as simple as bad business, bad government it would be easier to fix. Unfortunately it is bad citizens. Most of the political will we have to overcome is our own.

That is our biggest challenge.

I thought it was a straight forward question.

If the cost of USA strawberries goes up, and imported strawberries are cheaper because their labor costs are still low, whats the plan.