The hydra-headed monster stalking America is the rapid economic disintegration of the middle class; massive, unregulated immigration, much of which comes from cultures openly hostile or oblivious to the requirements of human liberty and self-government; and destructive, managed trade agreements that are an attack on ordered freedom and sovereignty
Worse, they sit connected to the body of a dying Judeo-Christian ethos and its demand of virtue that has informed and advanced the Republic – and the world – for nearly three centuries.
None of this is accidental.
These are the commingled and interlocked disasters facing America – decades in the making – that now threaten its existence just as surely as the Soviet Union did a generation ago.
And they are in part driving the campaign of Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent those of Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders.
These central questions concerning the stagnating economy and falling wages, radical immigration policies, and one-sided trade agreements, should be the center of any campaign, and the underlying premise of every debate question; but amazingly they are scarcely discussed in depth, or only done so in a pedantic or superficial manner.
The continual stripping away of the wealth of middle class Americans is clearly established. The inflation adjusted wages of middle income earners has been falling for decades, while their net worth has slipped dramatically in the past decade. New job creation has not been close to the number of jobs required for population growth, and much of those new jobs are now part-time, low paying work. Tragically, there is the ignored depression era unemployment and underemployment in some minority communities and in the 18-25 age cohort.
At the same time, the poverty rate, welfare benefits and food stamps have exploded to all-time highs, as tens of millions of working age citizens have faded off the work rolls and into the ranks of the permanently unemployed.
Washington seem oblivious to this ongoing disaster; exploding Federal regulations, Obamacare and its new 2016 taxes, massive spending increases and deficits in the omnibus 2016 budget, and the highest corporate taxes in the world (only this week, two more major U.S. firms announced plans to leave the U.S. due to taxes), are crippling an already feeble economy.
Integral to the crumbling middle class is the flood of legal and illegal immigration. It is a planned disaster. What else could it be? The borders have been wide open for forty years or more in spite of the laws already in place, and nearly 40% of those in the country illegally have simply overstayed their visas, disappearing into the population (500,000 in the past year alone). There are now upwards of 50 million immigrants, legal and illegal in the U.S., nearly 14% of the population, up from only 6% in 1980. (The current Congress seeks to greatly expand this number, including 300,000 additional Muslim refugees.)
In addition, legal immigration in the last decade has seen the adoption of a new “business model” by many U.S. corporations, hospitals and universities, using foreign labor being imported using H-1B and H-2B (just expanded dramatically in the 2016 omnibus budget) visas to supplant American labor at much lower pay scale. While 11 million science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) credentialed Americans can’t find work in their field, there is intense pressure in Congress by American businesses to flood the U.S. with any “willing worker” from overseas to further drive down wages.
Where financial self-sufficiency and assimilation into the American culture was once a requirement of U.S. immigration policy, assimilation has been replaced by accommodation. Today over 50% of immigrant families with children are on public assistance.
Calls for closing the southern border, deporting criminal aliens, an “immigration breather” on all new immigration, or the critical issue of Muslim refugees and how to vet them, are never met with solid, fact based arguments; rather they are instantly met with accusations of “nativism” and “xenophobia” by open border advocates, most of whom have a direct financial or political interest in promoting more uncontrolled immigration.
Finally, both falling incomes and immigration are tied in part to the one-way, managed trade agreements, presented under the rubric of “free trade,” that have stripped 5 to 20 million jobs out of America, depending on who is counting, as tens of thousands of factories have unbolted their equipment and left the country. From the signing of NATA in 1993, through a succession of trade agreements, America has seen a mass exodus of manufacturing, and trillions of dollars of wealth drained in trade imbalances.
Free trade, of course, is a conservative, bed rock issue. Yet the existing agreements, especially the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) now in Congress, have very little to do with free trade. Like its predecessors, TPP is more of an attack on American sovereignty and Constitutional self-government, supplanting it with a byzantine set of rules and ruling bodies beyond the reach of American law. The dirty little secret of these trade agreements is that they are designed to strip wealth from Americans to someone else.
This is obvious in the current agreements; manipulated currency rates are routinely used against the over-valued U.S. dollar, a variety of hidden fees and consumption taxes make U.S. products more expensive and are effectively a tariff, trade and technology theft is chronic, and local corruption and significant impediments to doing business in foreign markets are the norm, not the exception.
The net result is that there are now only a tiny handful of trading partners in the world with whom the U.S. has a balanced or positive trade position.
In the end, of course, the critical issues facing America specifically – because we are a Constitutional republic – are the stress faults caused by the demands of corporate and libertarian globalism on ordered, constitutional nationalism. Are we Americans first, or must we submit our heritage and faith to a world that does not value what we have traditionally valued?
Are the Bill of Rights and individual liberty an anachronism of a dying age? Who gets to decide that?
Instead of a direct debate and discussion of these critical issues in detail and what is best for America and Americans, an ignored public – 75% of whom report that they think their country is on the wrong track – have been treated to the rantings of two aged Marxists on one side; and on the other a hoard of candidates and their minions in the enfeebled “conservative” movement, debating who is, or isn’t, a real conservative.
It only delays the serious discussion Americans have to have.