Dear Senator Warner:
As the text of S. 1247, a bill to develop and recruit new, high-value jobs to the United States, to encourage the repatriation of jobs that have been off-shored to other countries, and for other purposes. comes available, I will follow it closely. This is an important issue, and attracting “new, high-value jobs to the United States” is a number one priority. I hope that your bill has considered the environment in which jobs grow, one in which:
- people have economic security — money — and can purchase goods and services,
- the infrastructure will bear the weight of the commerce, and
- there is a rich culture to enjoy and opportunity for children and families.
Recent downturns and responses to them based on cuts in spending have reduced all three of these aspects of our economic environment. Above all, it is the responsibility of government to maintain a culture in which people enjoy living and have opportunity. Our corporate welfare focus is foolish. We need to build infrastructure, take care of the health care mess once and for all by extending Medicare to everyone who wants to enroll and supporting Medicaid. We need to defend — and extend — Social Security and restore the retirement age to a reasonable 62, which would open up opportunity for young people. Older people who can scarcely keep up the pace are now locked into jobs they are no longer able to do by the necessity to keep employer medical insurance and the prospect of poverty with reduced Social Security. Let older Americans retire and spend their retirement accounts and Social Security on travel and support for their children and grandchildren — something other than medical care — and the economy will turn around.
I look forward to voting for you again and again as our Senator from Virginia, and I hope I will get to vote for you for President in the future. Please understand that I do not want to take away from business, but business does not thrive except in a dynamic culture that produces demand for goods and services. Money trickles up, not down, and we know this every time we pay our credit card payment. If we keep cutting off our most vulnerable and forcing our middle class into poverty by low wages, expensive education, rising food costs, rising energy costs, abusive credit practices, and tax incentives to wealthy private corporations we will not survive.
For an economy to thrive, some of the money that goes up needs to be forced back down to the bottom so that it can recirculate. The way to do this is to collect taxes from the people who use our labor force and our infrastructure and our consumer base to become wealthy. The wealthy are not the source of jobs, they are the result of many people working to get by and to have a few dollars extra to take the family to the beach once a year and to carry smart phones in their pockets. The working people are the source of jobs and the source of wealth because they both do the work and generate the demand for goods and services. Infusing money at the top and asking corporations for the favor of a few jobs is utterly ridiculous.
I hope that your new bill considers the workers in the United States when you are thinking about jobs, because if our workers are not healthy and hopeful and do not benefit from their work we will not have an economy no matter how much money we give to corporations.
I hope also that you will see this message. I know that you receive many letters, but this message is clear. In the United States today we are seriously talking about taking out the foundations of the economy and trying to sustain the wealth at the top by giving more money to wealthy people. This is a third world solution, and we can do better.
Life in the Third Layer 