I'm sorry. I didn't read it. I have no interest in opinions about the sayings of politicians. I have no interest in what politicians say but rather in what they do. But let me interject a few thoughts. In the first place, the government can't create jobs in a way that helps the economy. The reason is that, when it hires people, it creates a new expense on the budget and a new burden on the taxpayer. Since government is a net spender of wealth rather than a creater of wealth, it actually hurts the economy to hire more government workers. It's fine for the workers, but not for the economy. The jobs that matter to the economy are all in the private sector. In the private sector, managers aren't interested in creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs. They hire people to address needs in their organization. If they succeed and grow, they will add jobs. If they shrink, jobs will shrink along with them. So the problem isn't jobs. The problem is a bad economy. If the economy were good, unemployment wouldn't be an issue. So what caused the bad economy? Was it selling worthless real estate derivatives? Was it granting mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them? I don't think so. If those were the issues we would have blown through them a long time ago. This recession is now 4 years old. That's a disaster. I think the real cause of the bad economy is our sending our jobs and wealth abroad for the past 40 years. That's an opinion, of course, but I hold that opinion because this recession isn't behaving like all the other ones I've lived through. This one feels permanent. It feels like the cause is something long term, not some wall street greed that occured in the last decade. So how can we fix it? I believe the only way is to bring those jobs and wealth back home and, since it will take a long time, we need to start working on it quickly. What can the government do? The first thing is to embrace capitalism - the very system that made us the wealthiest country in the world and that is now making China the wealthiest country in the world. The government needs to stop viewing business as the enemy. It is the private sector that produces 100% of the wealth we Americans enjoy - every single nickel of it. It needs to clean up the regulatory mess businesses face in operating here. In other words, it needs to incent U.S. production rather than foreign production. It needs to understand that business taxes are the same thing as personal taxes because those taxes become part of the price for everything we buy. It needs to rethink its stance on globalization and free trade. Higher import duties would help American businesses compete here at home. No need to lecture me about free trade. Yes, I understand the trade wars it would create. We're in trouble and we need to do drastic things. Finally, the federal government needs to get smaller. Instead of wanting to prey on those who create jobs for more money, spend less so that these folks will have the money to invest when a favorable climate for investment appears. In my view the government is the single largest obstacle to our country's future prosperity. I don't know what the President said in his speech nor do I care. I'm sure it was the typical band aids designed to reduce anger in the electorate and to give government even more power and control. Whatever he said, I can say it won't help. It wouldn't help no matter who the President is or what he said. Government can't fix it. It can only get out of the way. Sorry.
remind me of the plot summary of H.G. Wells "The Time Machine". Unfortunately, Peter Schiff has the distinction of being the pessimistic/working class/Morlock-although without the cannibalism. If anything, the cannibalism is clearly distorted into the liberal direction in modern-day USA (i.e. have a goonish psychopath like Nancy Pelosi enact laws to steal money from the working class to give to the idealistic). Only when the "Morlocks" become enlightened will the theft stop. Unfortunately, I don't believe that evolution will occur soon enough before a massive blow-up. "The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension, and his demonstration of a tabletop model machine for travelling through it. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator. In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device with a journey that takes him to the year 802,701 A.D., where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful communist society, the result of humanity conquering nature with technology, and subsequently evolving to adapt to an environment in which strength and intellect are no longer advantageous to survival. Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller finds his time machine missing, and eventually works out that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutish light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers, and with no real challenges facing either species. They have both lost the intelligence and character of Man at its peak." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine
