Web Letters: Crashing the Election

Do you know that infamous socialist Swedish government, so often ridiculed by John McCain and Rush Limbaugh? There is a change of heart among our staunch conservatives. The Swedish government is now a prominent role model for the GOP. The coming federal bailout of our failing financial system will be modeled after similar actions undertaken by the government of Sweden in the early 1990s.

These days the federal government isn’t anymore a part of problem but a part of the solution. You know the notorious GOP mantra that the long-ago-implemented tax cuts would result in increased tax revenues? Several hundred billions of dollars to be spend by the feds on salvaging our financial industry should result in even larger future tax collections than those tax cuts did.

Or not. Those tax cuts have made our businesses so flush with cash that they can’t even pay their own bills any longer.

The GOP leaders look like rebellious teenagers swerving away from dad’s lap only to come back for protection after getting a bloody nose in the real world. If you come back for protection you are not really rebellious, just plain stupid.

Regarding The Nation’s utopian editorial hope that the press and the presidential candidates would find the answer to our fundamental problems during the coming debates, don’t hold your breath any longer. It will not happen there. If they had known the answers they would have told us many years ago.

Use the fundamental laws of mathematic and physics to solve the crisis. The cause of financial meltdown is colossal greed and the directly related free-trade philosophy and consequential enormous trade deficits. It’s a utopian idea (again) to believe that somebody else in the world would work hard and cheap to make essential life necessities and goods for us. Once we connect the US and Chinese markets without any flow control, the different levels of labor wages in those two countries are destined to equalize. It is just a matter of time (and the size of the pipe connecting two vessels with different levels of liquid inside) how long it will take for this process to complete.

The only way to prevent this from happening is to impose a balanced approach to the foreign trade and demand the trade deficit to be equal to zero and to defend this philosophy at all cost. Our government has to impose import fees equal to the trade deficit on our importers.

Without that, hardly anything would be produced here in the USA. Why? It could be manufactured or serviced cheaper overseas, which would result in the closing of the factories here and exporting our jobs overseas. That would create a surplus of labor here, which would result in diminishing wages. And the process would go on and on, till American and Chinese workers had similar wages--the difference would be equal to the cost of transportation.

Of course, nobody with any common sense would expect people with earning Chinese wages to be able to cope with the financial burden of having $30k in credit card debt and several hundred thousand dollars in outstanding mortgages. Families in such a position would eventually be unable to pay their bills--which has started happening, thus causing the burst of the housing bubble, the mortgage crisis and the financial turmoil on the Wall Street.

Having a completely incompetent President in the White House accelerated the whole process, but don’t fool yourself, even Bill Clinton in top shape wouldn’t be able to avoid it. The mathematical principles will overcome in the long run any amount of tactical wisdom, diplomatic dexterity and personal charm a President may have.

At the pace of $700 billion in trade deficit per year, it’s just a matter of time when we as a nation will go broke, unless we change the current course.

Kenan Porobic

Charlotte, NC