We live in a world in which Michele Bachmann has no issues with taking money in government subsidies for a family farm and can still say with a straight face that unemployment benefits are something that the United States government simply cannot afford to pay.

We are also living in a world in which we pay more for health care than just about any other country and yet our quality of health care is among the worst, considering all of the people that die because they don’t have benefits. Most interestingly of all, we are living in a world in which we have somehow gone from having people sneak into the country to find work into having people flee because of a lack of work:

“It’s now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico,” Sacramento’s Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. “We have become a middle-class country.”

Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.

An estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants have left California since 2008, though the remaining 2.6 million still make up 7 percent of the population and 9 percent of the labor force, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Every time I read a report about increases in outsourcing or even see a onesie like the one we got for Chaim for Fourth of July that says “Made in the USA” (i.e. that Chaim was) and then look on the inside and see that the item was made in, say, China — I have to wonder how people are so confused as to where the jobs are going.

Companies outsource labor to other countries to save money and then the CEOs give themselves multimillion dollar bonuses as a reward and watch as they sell less product because — that’s right, fewer people can afford to shop when more people are unemployed.

It used to be that people were whining about illegal immigrants taking jobs. It seems we are headed in the way of people leaving the United States and hoping to find work there — maybe at a job that was outsourced there by an American company!

6 Comments

  1. Love the article, Gordon! Love the images of young Chaim even more! SMILE! I agree we’re in trouble here in the USA. New jobs aren’t getting created. Current jobs are being devalued. In NY State, many government workers now face wage freezes for three years with an eventual 100% increase in paycheck healthcare deductions. Office co-pays will rise 100% to $40 per visit. Plus, mandatory furloughs make people screw down and save every cent. We need people to spend what they earn, not tighten down skimpy budgets even more.

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