I enjoy watching the livestream video (http://www.livestream.com/...) of Occupy Wall Street. From what the MSM tells us, they can't figure out what the people are demanding. All they need to do is read the signs. That's what I do when I watch the video -read the signs. After a few minutes, it's easy to get the general trends:
1) No more bailouts 2) Forgive student debt 3) Bring back Glass–Steagall 4) Outlaw lobbyists and corporate money in the political process. 5) Single Payer Healthcare
I agree with and support all of the above. Sadly, one very important concept is underrepresented: (Below the fold)
That concept is that our trade deficit is also bleeding this country dry of jobs and tax revenue.
Over the last decade, farming out manufacturing to China and legal and IT service to India has cost our nation millions of living wage and high wage jobs.
How to solve this problem? Let's go to an unlikely source for a solution - a member of the 1% - Warren Buffet.
Arguably this is one of the few 1% who actually cares about the health and future of our country and is willing to speak up. That's a good thing. Back in 2003, he wrote an op ed piece in Fortune that proposed a clever solution to the problem - Import Certificates. Find the link at the bottom. Here's a clip from that piece.
We would achieve this balance by issuing what I will call Import Certificates (ICs) to all U.S. exporters in an amount equal to the dollar value of their exports. Each exporter would, in turn, sell the ICs to parties -- either exporters abroad or importers here -- wanting to get goods into the U.S. To import $1 million of goods, for example, an importer would need ICs that were the byproduct of $1 million of exports. The inevitable result: trade balance.Because our exports total about $80 billion a month, ICs would be issued in huge, equivalent quantities -- that is, 80 billion certificates a month -- and would surely trade in an exceptionally liquid market. Competition would then determine who among those parties wanting to sell to us would buy the certificates and how much they would pay. (I visualize that the certificates would be issued with a short life, possibly of six months, so that speculators would be discouraged from accumulating them.)
I believe that ICs would produce, rather promptly, a U.S. trade equilibrium well above present export levels but below present import levels. The certificates would moderately aid all our industries in world competition, even as the free market determined which of them ultimately met the test of "comparative advantage."
I can't make it to an occupy site. Can some one put this up on a sign?
Fri Oct 21, 2011 at 11:26 AM PT: Senators Byron Dorgan (ND) and Russell Feingold (WI) introduced Import Certificates in the Balanced Trade Restoration Act of 2006 where it was promptly ignored.