Let’s pretend I don’t know about the election next week. You’ve all decided without me, and many have already voted. So I’m going to continue last column’s insignificant comments on economics. Nothing about the election. I promise.
Last time I talked about immigration and population. But there’s more to economic problems than that. Things have been a little weird since the pandemic.
For example, many women left the job market during the pandemic and didn’t come back because of the high cost of child care. If good caretakers want good pay, that brings the cost of child care perilously close to job income. Of course, that was also true before the pandemic, so it’s not clear why this changed, but statistics indicate that it did.
And who else needs care from low-paid workers? Old people. Where can you find people to do messy eldercare at an affordable price? Immigrants. My parents chose to grow old in Portland, Ore., and surprisingly, eldercare there had been largely taken over by Romanian immigrants. They were licensed, probably legal and they did a good job. But old folks like me won’t have Romanians to take care of us here.
Another pandemic thing was that more people retired than normal. Now they can’t come back to work even if they want to. The younger people promoted into their jobs aren’t leaving. Everybody moved up, leaving starter jobs. Retired people who don’t like retirement as much as they expected aren’t desperate enough to start at the bottom.
And then there’s the claim that all the good jobs were shipped off to Mexico or China. That term “shipped off” is not exactly what happened. American workers were outbid. If a corporation can have its doodads manufactured for $5 an hour in Vietnam or $20 an hour in the United States, which are they going to choose? If you don’t like it, you don’t like capitalism. And you probably also wouldn’t like paying more at Walmart for locally manufactured doodads.
So when you hear politicians claiming they are going to bring jobs back from overseas, what they mean (whether they know it or not) is that those jobs will come back to robots. Robots cost money, but then they run for free 24 hours a day with no benefits. It takes people to manage robots, but not nearly as many as it took to do the job before, which is the whole point. But robots can’t yet take care of children or old people.
Fortunately, all of our economic problems will be gone after the election. Donald Trump will raise tariffs to make foreigners pay for everything, or Kamala Harris will raise taxes to make rich people pay for everything.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. If tariffs go up, the cost of everything from other countries will go up. Check the labels at Walmart to see what that means. Furthermore, those countries will raise tariffs on our products. What does that mean, for example, for copper from our mines?
If Kamala Harris wins, she won’t have the congressional votes to raise taxes on anyone. Even if she did, rich people don’t have enough to cover the $2.75 trillion the United States will spend this year, or pay back the $35.8 trillion debt. Maybe the rich should pay more, but there is no tax fairy.
Wait! What about my promise? Forget the election. In any case, neither tariffs nor taxing the rich is likely to stop global warming, artificial intelligence, the wars in Ukraine and Israel or the famine in Sudan.
The owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, decided that the Post will not endorse for president this year. Some think he’s afraid of Trump’s retribution.
Daily Press Publisher Nick Seibel told me that, although he hates making endorsements, he will probably make them again as his duty this year. Newspaper endorsements don’t seem to matter much, as you could confirm by comparing endorsements to election winners. And endorsements in columns like mine are completely worthless. No one cares, not even Trump.
Nevertheless, if I criticize Bezos for wimping out, perhaps I should explain why I voted against Trump. Here are some reasons:
Mexico will pay for the wall. I like people who weren’t captured. Bone spurs. Easily conned by dictators (Vladimir Putin). JD Vance takes over. War dead were losers. Selling “patriotic” Bibles. Pardon January 6 convicts. Stormy Daniels. Stable genius. Trump University. If she weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. And on and on…
When Trump talks about the enemy within, he means me. If he’s elected, our only hope is that his promises mean as much as my promise at the start of this column.
