As your Senate representative to DC, I will 100% focus on RESTORING AMERICAN JOBS; by ending the regulatory assaults on businesses and workers and by ensuring fair and reciprocal trade and increasing pathways to good-paying jobs:

Equal Opportunity is NOT Equity

The term “equity” as used by Social Justice Warriors (SJW) is simply racist because it judges people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character.

Having good job skills is a valuable asset and every American has the right to compete in the job market based on the merit of their qualifications. While the Equal Opportunity Commission was established to serve a vital role in ensuring equal opportunities for every American and to protect them from discrimination; it cannot be allowed to tip the scale in favor of one group over another by enforcing equity or diversity quotas.  It is high time to end the EEOC.

As for learning valuable job skills, it’s time we took a hard look at our colleges and universities.  It is nothing less than a scam to hawk higher education as a path to better careers when some majors don’t translate into real job prospects.

And when these institutes don’t deliver, students ought to be able to sue for a refund.  Frankly, college is not for everyone, not when technical and vocational schools can fill the gap in training students in skilled trades.  And it doesn’t help when Big Government steps in to give grants and loans regardless of the student’s ability to succeed in college.

Minimum Wage

While raising federal minimum wages to so-called living wages sounds good, the reality is that it destroys the small businesses ability to compete. Meanwhile, multi-national corporations are able to absorb the hikes (and actually lobby for it as it bankrupts their smaller competition) and in the end, unemployment goes up. Leaving the worker worse off, or at best, no better off than before. How many times do we need to see cities that implemented a living wage fail horribly, before the politicians give up?

Absolute minimum wage is zero, because if one is unable to work, his/her income is $0. But by working and working well, one then has the opportunity to climb up the wage scale either within the company based on merit or use the current job to jump to better opportunities.

This pertains only to federal laws. If a state or municipality wants to institute minimum wages, that is up to the elected officials and their voters and they will deal with the consequences of economically unsound policies.

Iowa CD3 Representative, Cindy Axne, is an economic illiterate. Recently she told KMA radio’s “Morning Line” show in support of $15/hr minimum wage: “As a small business owner myself, and one that’s been listening to all of our small businesses, in particular in rural Iowa, this will cause harm.” But the benefits of increasing it outweigh the costs. “We cannot have a state like Iowa not have $15 an hour, because then we’ll see a brain drain, and more of our younger Iowans leaving our state to go to states surrounding us that have it. We’ll also see businesses come in that pay low. That’s not the kind of businesses we want in Iowa.”

Oh noes, we can’t risk losing our kids to Chicago where the minimum wage is $15/hr, where gas is nearly a dollar per gallon more and the cost of living is higher. No, what she is proposing will destroy the thousands of mom & pop businesses in Iowa, leaving the big corporations that can absorb the higher labor costs. Left unsaid, is that raising the minimum wage will also bump up tax revenues, dumping the people that manage to keep a job right back where they were before the wage hike and no better off.

Cindy, if you want to help the jobs market in Iowa, just butt out. Leave the business owners alone to figure out how best to grow their business. It is not up to the Federal government to “invest” in jobs, nor to interfere in private contracts between the employer and employee.

Bring Back Offshore Jobs

During the 1992 elctions, Ross Perot (I voted for him twice — Bush/Dole were not America First candidates) warned us that NAFTA would cause US companies to offshore their factories in pursuit of lower labor costs.

According to Economic Policy Institute:

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have experienced a net loss of jobs under NAFTA, with the U.S. losing 766,030 actual and potential jobs between 1993 and 2000 (see NAFTA’s Hidden Costs from the report NAFTA at Seven ). With exports from every state being offset by faster growth in imports, net job loss figures range from a low of 395 jobs lost in Alaska to a high of 82,354 in California. Other hard-hit states include Michigan, New York, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia, each with more than 20,000 jobs lost. These states all have high concentrations of the kinds of industries (motor vehicles, textiles and apparel, computers and electrical appliances) that subsequently have expanded rapidly in the maquilidora zones in Mexico since the implementation of NAFTA.

Iowa was impacted just as well, as documented by Citizen.org:

…More than 30,000 specific Iowa jobs have been certified under one narrow government program, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), as lost to outsourcing or imports since NAFTA…

…Before NAFTA, the United States had a small trade surplus with Mexico and Canada in the top 10 products that Iowa exports to the NAFTA nations. That has turned into a massive $88 billion deficit as the increase in NAFTA imports swamped the increase in U.S. exports to Mexico and Canada…

…Nationwide, the U.S. agricultural trade balance with NAFTA partners has fallen from a $2.7 billion trade surplus in the year before NAFTA to a $9.3 billion trade deficit in 2018…

Magic Wand = Tariffs

When then-candidate Donald Trump was running for office, one of his primary promises to potential voters was that he would jump-start the economy to such an extent that there would be a resurgence in manufacturing jobs and the nation’s gross domestic product growth rate would meet and exceed 4 or 5 percent. In response during a PBS townhall, Obama sarcastically asked; “He’s gonna bring all these jobs back. Well how is he gonna do that? What are you gonna do? There’s no answer to it. He says, ‘I’m gonna negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate a better deal? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

By implementing tariffs on a variety of products, over the objections of the US Chamber of Commerce, the usual RINOs and even noted conservative pundits like Mark Levin, Trump proved that tariffs are indeed a magic wand. While others touted complicated schemes, Trump reset the conversation by eliminating thousands of jobs-choking regulations and going back to the Constitution, Art.1, §8, Cl.1: Taxing & Spending, or General Welfare:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States

Taking to Twitter, Trump answered Obama;
“‘President Trump would need a magic wand to get to 4% GDP,’ stated President Obama. I guess I have a magic wand, 4.2%, and we will do MUCH better than this! We have just begun.”

Employment Visas

Tariffs worked to reduce trade deficits and bring back jobs, what about the importation of workers to replace American workers?

While immigration of merit-based foreigners is vital to America’s growth; employment visas should not be used to undercut American workers, therefore H1B and similar work-related visas shall incur a tariff of 25% above prevailing wages as determined by the Department of Labor (DOL), PLUS the delta between max DOL wage determination and the actual wages on an individual basis.

Tariff Imported Labor

Example: for Santa Clara County, CA, the DOL hourly rate for SCA 14045 – Computer Operator V is $33.43 .  Please understand; the Federal Government uses the SCAs to determine fair market labor rates throughout the country for contracting purposes.

Typically, the contractor will attest and provide documentation to the government contracting office to prove that their proposed rates for labor are conformed to the DOL published rates.  I propose that the same standards be applied to employment visas.  The image on the left is a screenshot of the relevant sections from the SCA 14045 Labor Rate PDF (Click to enlarge).

If a company already has an American employee (Emp A) at $35/hr, but wants to hire two foreign employees under H1B visa; paying Employee B at the average rate of $33.43/hr and Employee C at $25/hr (far below SCA rates) while classifying both as “Computer Operator V”, same as the American worker, under the old rules.

To simplify, let’s say that to the employer’s basic cost of labor, excluding indirect costs and unemployment taxes; Emp A costs about $43/hr, Emp B about $41/hr and Emp C about $32/hr.

This is also a sneaky way of driving down labor rates across the board, because the DOL uses sampled averaging to come up with the official rate.  So the more foreigners are imported cheaply, the further the labor rate trends downward. And oftentimes, the visa holder is at the mercy of unethical employers when it comes to overtime etc and dares not complain lest the visa be revoked.

Implementing  an individual wage differential tariff on visa holders would look something like this (the 1st amount is the sum tariff paid to the government) with the total surcharge being the sum of the max rate tariff plus the difference in actual pay rate:

• $0.00 to the Treasury on Emp A ($35 x 0% surcharge). Net cost to Employer $35/hr.
• $8.36 to the Treasury for Emp B. Net cost to Employer $41.79/hr.
• $33.43 SCA x 25% surcharge = $8.36 + $0 differential ($33.43 SCA – $33.43 /hr pay).
• $16.79 to the Treasury for Emp C. Net cost to Employer $41.72/hr.
• $33.43 SCA x 0.25 surcharge = $8.36 + $8.43 differential ($33.43 SCA – $25/hr pay).
• For simplicity, the above figures do not include mandated and non-mandated costs of fringe benefits (health & welfare, vacation, holidays, hazardous pay differential, uniforms, shift differential, as well as various Federal/State employee withholding taxes. These costs shall also be calculated into overall costs for the labor tariff.
• This ensures that the employer truly cannot find an American to work at $33.43/hr before resorting to paying a total of $33.43 + $8.36 = $41.79/hr plus fringe and related employment taxes. The mere act of being willing to pay more for foreign labor eliminates the burden of proof that they need imported labor.

If the employer pays a foreign worker above the average wage scale, that employee either rolls over to the next higher Labor Category and/or the employer is tariffed at the flat rate of 25% plus the differential.

Streamline the application process for employment visas. Simply put, if the employer feels it is essential to their bottom-line to pay a premium for foreign workers, then let the government get out of the way while collecting the tariff into the General Fund. As employers remit the tariffs quarterly, they shall also submit employee-anonymized wage data on visa workers to DOL to be compiled into a public-access database, including the job category, actual individual wages, differential-plus tariff, weekly hours worked and employer by locality.

In short order, employers will self-regulate to only hire foreign workers that are truly essential to their business model. Americans can utilize the public access data to identify the skillsets needed to fill and thus negotiate a better salary for themselves.  After all, why should Emp A, the American, accept $35/hr when he or she knows that Emp B/C costs the company more?

E-Verify

With regards to E-Verify, I am of mixed feelings. To implement this, it means once again, the Federal government is establishing and maintaining a database of Americans. As we well know, malicious government agents are not above using databases to harass and abuse citizens merely for political reasons. The No-Fly list has been used to block “political enemies” from exercising their unalienable right to travel. The IRS has likewise been used to go after “enemies”. E-Verify will be ripe for abuse, simply by blocking “enemies”, based on politics from getting a new job.

Before we go to that extreme, I believe there are other measures we can implement. Start by going hard after identity thieves; make the Social Security Administration and IRS flag suspected fraudulent use of SS numbers with other agencies, like ICE as well as State agencies. If two people are using the same SS number, then one or more have stolen that identity.

There are other common sense measures we can implement and enforce without adding more government databases.