For our isolationistic nationalism loving DU'ers who want the world to be a bigger place

[Selatius]

123. What went wrong is the US never instituted publicly funded elections and is destroying itself.

Of course corporatists are going to support politicians who push tax cuts on the top 1%. They're the ones who will benefit from such a pay-out, and they'll keep more of their money if there are fewer social programs in the United States.

If you want to rebuild America's Middle Class, you need to give them high-paying jobs. Those people who keep pushing free trade essentially destroyed unionized manufacturing jobs in the United States, and that was THE bulwark of the American Middle Class. That bulwark is gone.

I'm not against trade with other nations, but I am against trade if the main point of the endeavor is simple global labor arbitrage. For that, I favor scientific tariffs levied and changed yearly that attempts to equalize labor costs across borders. It may cost $15 to make an iPhone in the dictatorship of China and $85 to make it in the United States, and Apple should be free to move factories to China to make that phone, but before those phones are allowed into the United States, they should pay a labor tariff of $70/phone to equalize the costs. In this effort, corporations would be forced to compete on quality of the products, not the simple cost of the products.