Stimulus: Labor Must Contribute!
Our infrastructure needs repair and we need to create jobs. The jobs that are created are by design short term. The purpose of a stimulus is to increase consumer demand for goods and services so that business will add long term jobs to meet the demand. The end result is our upgraded infrastructure allows us to better compete economically against the rest of the world.and our econmy recovers faster.
The tax payer alone should not be paying for the stimulus. Members of labor unions and companies who are awarded contracts should respectively lower their profit margins and wage rates to help spur the economy and thus jobs. The result would be that the stimulus dollars provided by the government would allow more infrastructure repaired and expanded, more jobs created and an economy that will get healthier faster.
The question is whether these three special interest groups, government, labor and business, can work together to solve the problem. More: http://bit.ly/ruPhbs
I'd disagree somewhat on the labor wage rates, because it is specifically those wages that are applied to creating demand in other areas. We should actually be looking to try to push wage rates up until the median comes back into line with productivity gains; that additional income would then drive gorwth in other sectors. If we can get median income up to the 90K range, where it should be now, then we'll be much better able to sustain growth without the need for as much federal input.
ReplyDeleteThe application of taxes here is not as much to actually collect money but to signal to companies that they'll do better to put more revenue into wages and investments in future income rather than short term profit margins. Their total profit will be much, much higher over the long term if they pay self sustaining wages than if they destroy future demand by pushing them down.
I am advocating that if the union will agree to lower wages in these stimulus projects, more wokers can be hired and demand will even go higher, Everyne wins.
ReplyDeleteFellow union members helping other members