TARIFF ACHILLES HEEL

Educating the American Workforce

It takes time to change a paradigm. The Stock Market dips because of the uncertainty introduced by the Trump Administration’s punitive tariff policy. There will be no stability in the short term. The East will side with China (because they are afraid of China) and the West will waffle as usual (since they are mostly socialists anyway). This will be another Individual Freedom (free market capitalism) versus The Collective (communism) battle.

But the financial markets are not the economy. The economy is what the average American family feels, both short term and long term. Some call it the “kitchen table” issues. It is the real “cost of living.”

It should be clear to anyone that the Biden Administration’s policies were a disaster for the American kitchen table. The first blow was to raise energy costs by attacking the fossil fuel and nuclear energy industry and pushing the Green New Deal onto an unsuspecting public. Then the Open Borders policy destroyed the public service sector by overwhelming medical services, public safety and educational capacity with waves of unvetted illegal immigrants.

Increased energy costs had an immediate impact on transportation and supply costs. The increased demand from 20 million non-tax paying immigrants is real and inflationary. Federal stimulus (printing dollars) just fueled the inflationary fire.

But the thrust of Trump’s tariffs is to bring back manufacturing jobs. That will take time. Modern manufacturing plants will not be built overnight AND it will require a massive increase in the skilled labor and technical workforce.

The weakness is clear. We have demeaned blue-collar careers and allowed academic tenure to dilute higher education. Social activists have displaced good managers in corporate America. We have abandoned our own workers and shipped their manufacturing skill sets (and our technology) to Asia. And there are no unions there so wages are low. They build and dump products on the American market.

But the American turn-around must begin in middle and high school education. And that will require a change in mission, heart and leadership of the education unions and higher-learning academia.

Made in America will be more expensive than Made in China for a while. That is just one of the costs of Freedom. If we want to out-manufacture China then we better start to out-educate China. And that will take some time and patience. Unfortunately, patience is a Chinese virtue. Americans are impatient. But Americans are persistent, that’s our virtue. And we will win out.