RICK SANTORUM FOR PRESIDENT - 2016

[Disclosure:  Rick Santorum is probably my least favorite politician.]

So Rick Santorum is running for president again.  By emphasizing his religious extremism, he managed to win a number of states in the Republican primaries of 2012.  Now he has presumably decided to cater to the American worker (he says) as well.  If I was an American worker, I would watch that hand under the table.  He says that he would somehow increase wages for the American worker.  Strange how Republicans discover the American worker every four years, but tromp on them in the intervening years (Get rid of the minimum wage or at least not increase it.  This would supposedly increase the number of jobs but make all workers even poorer than now.).  The predominant Republican opinion seems to be that the American worker is overpaid. Santorum doesn't say how he is going to increase the wages of the American worker, but, to be sure, it is early days in this political process with the election still 14 months away!

Mitt Romney did say how he would approach this problem.  He would make things favorable to starting more small businesses.  The trouble with this is, that early in his work life, he did work on promoting start-ups and did create some jobs, but he found he could make more money faster by manipulating money and abandoned start-ups.  That is a problem. The average start-up lasts about 5 or 6 years so the jobs are really rather temporary but can the number of start-ups even be increased enough in order to employ all the unemployed and minimally employed?

A problem with capitalism is that companies must sell ever more and preferably more expensive goods.  There are a couple of ways to do this: one is to get the domestic people to buy (want) ever more goods.  Here advertising plays a role.  Another is to export goods to people in other lands who need more goods.  This works well for exports to some foreign countries, though exchange rates do not always favor American companies.  Also most people in foreign countries cannot afford to buy our goods.  Encouraging more start-ups certainly will help with the employment problem but probably is not the total solution to the employment problem.  How are more start-ups to be encouraged: through government assistance or tax advantages (which is government assistance by a different name.)?

The American worker faces a number of problems that I have mentioned before.*  One is that the wages of the American worker have to be less than the cost of automation.  Another, of course, is that the wages must be competitive with the wages of low cost labor in other countries, tempered by the costs of transportation, increased costs of fuel in other countries, etc.  Then there is the problem that many, many jobs have just disappeared, such as telephone operators, gas station attendants, clerk typists, grocery store clerks, etc.  Even grocery store clerk jobs are being minimized by automated check out.

The point is that the drag on workers wages and number of jobs are many, and I doubt these problems are amenable to simple solutions.

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-race-to-bottom.html; http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/05/plight-of-american-workers.html: