TAX BREAKS WILL DO NOTHING

Obama talks about giving tax breaks to the middle class, but a tax break is no substitute for a job that pays well. That area is where the most important work has to be done, in both the short and the long term.

You either stop the bleeding of good jobs overseas, or you create good jobs which can't go overseas - or both. The first requires a shift in corporate attitude back to where it was when companies valued their employees. It always amazes me when kids crow about their job fluidity. They think they can manipulate the employer system - and they can, if they're uniquely skilled. But most aren't, and can't - and those that are could manipulate even a socialist system to get to the level they want to reach.

I don't know how you legislate a requirement that corporations pay more of their profits to their workers than they now do - in other words, higher pay for work. In the old days, it took revolutions in Europe, and here a hard-fought labor war for unionization, to accomplish that. The problem in the US is not just corporate preference for shareholders over workers; it's also worker compliance in that preference, a contempt for unionization without even understanding what it's for. As I've said before, the real triumph of Reaganism was an immense redistribution of wealth upward with minimal resistance from workers, and no armed conflict. Marx would have been amazed at the accomplishment, and saddened by his inability to work the game the other way. So to expect this change to happen voluntarily is foolish. Class war will be necessary.

As for the second, government can contribute to that by investing in new technologies and, through tax policy or direct legislation, making it painful for companies to shift that work overseas. The argument against that sort of protectionism is that it makes the US uncompetitive. But being competitive isn't worth much when all the profits go straight to executives who are constitutionally unwilling to share a dime of them.

That's what you do if you're the president of America and not just the president of the top 1%.