Lumpy 1
Diamond Member
- Jun 19, 2009
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I recall as a teenager walking through a General Motors Plant where my father was the General Manager. It was 5 1/2 hours into the work day and I asked him why most everyone wasn't working and just kinda sitting around. He told me that they had finished their union quota of work for the day and all they had to do was stay in their work area until it was time to go home.
In my younger years I worked for the a Machinist Union in S. California. This was in the early 80's. I was making $32.46 hr. and my quota of work lasted at most 5 hrs. a day, ask for more work because it was damn boring and you were threatened by fellow union members with broken body parts.
Nope, Unions have screwed up a good thing by expecting a free ride and making the businesses they worked for non-competitive and finally the companies being forced to move out of the country.
Lumpy, Lumpy, Lumpy...what to do with you? How many times does it have to be explained that Reagans twenty-five percent federal tax cut caused a considerable addition to the federal deficit, and an almost twenty percent rise in foreign investment on that debt that led to higher large dollar holdings and an unfavorable trade imbalance? That ninety-five percent of the reason for the deficits was high defense spending and Reagans refusal to raise taxes to pay for it? That by 1982, the deficit was 90 billion dollars, and by 1987 it totaled 283 billion dollars? That the shortfall of revenue required the US to borrow money, which raised interest rates? That the higher interest rates attracted foreign investment, which caused the value of the dollar to rise out of any proportion to its actual worth? That, as the dollar skyrocketed, imports became cheaper than products made by American labor, and the trade imbalance became even more disproportionate as foreign markets could not afford American made goods at the inflated dollar value either?
These circumstances were what compelled many American businesses to relocate to third-world countries in search of low wage labor platforms.Not the demands for decent working conditions and reasonable increases in wages by unions, not regulations that prohibited industry from urinating in our common well, and not a tax code that billed the wealthiest among us at very reasonable rates for services rendered.
Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers, 1992, 367-369.
Stockman, David A, The Triumph of Politics; How the Reagan Revolution Failed, 10-14 and 392, See also Chafe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, 486-487
Chafe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, 486-487
Thanks for your walk down memory lane..