Ted Cox worked as an electrician for 27 years before losing his job last April when his employer filed for bankruptcy.
Cox was earning $19 an hour but now makes ends meet on $351 in weekly unemployment benefits. He also receives $113 monthly in food stamps.
“There’s nobody hiring,” Cox said.
Two daughters, ages 13 and 17, live with him. His children qualify for Medicaid. He has no medical insurance. “God help me if I go out there and break my leg,” he said.
Repeal NAFTA and GATT if you want to fix the unemployment problem. We would have to raise tarrifs until manufacturing geared up, but that is the solution to this mess. Ross Perot was absolutely correct about the “giant sucking sound” of our jobs going away. It seems as if there was a conspiracy to enslave Americans to debt.
hear, hear no. 1
I agree #1. I have thought that (Paleo) Conservatives like Pat Buchanan, and others like Ross Perot, were right about “free trade” all along. Losing factory jobs, only to be replaced by minimum wage service jobs, isn’t my idea of progress.
And may I add, the charade can’t continue long, because minimum wage jobs don’t provide enough money for people to eat out all the time, play miniature golf, buy trendy clothes at the mall, go for ice cream, etc, so even for us to have minimum wage jobs, we need *somebody* making a decent wage in our communities, besides a select few.
A couple of years ago I actually had a member of the Fed board tell me in an interview that guys like this were supposed to take this opportunity to educate themselves and move up the socioeconomic ladder into professional jobs, leaving behind their old careers.
On the other hand, I heard on the news today that [url=http://www.accenture.com/]Accenture[/url] is hiring and I see that they do have lots of jobs posted.
#1–Try this on for size: If we had cut taxes by $787B instead of putting it in pork barrell earmarks, where would the job market be? I don’t disagree with you about NAFTA. If we did both, then the job creators in America would teh have the capital to build new factories.