Donald Trump Touts Rising Wages, Mitt Romney Urges ‘Responsibility’

This combination of file pictures created on February 20, 2018 shows US President Donald T
DREW ANGERER,MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty
Neil Munro

Mitt Romney’s description of a great America does not include wage gains for Americans, marking a huge contrast with President Donald Trump’s celebration of rising wages in his go-go economy.

Romney, a former investor, governor and failed GOP presidential candidate, is expected to become a leader in the GOP’s business-first win when he is sworn in as a Utah Sen. on Thursday.

Romney ignored wages as he described his elite-led vision for America in a January 1 Washington Post op-ed:

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

…

noble instincts live in the hearts of Americans. The people of this great land will eschew the politics of anger and fear if they are summoned to the responsibility by leaders in homes, in churches, in schools, in businesses, in government — who raise our sights and respect the dignity of every child of God — the ideal that is the essence of America.

Romney’s globalist view ignores Trump’s success at raising Americans’ wages.  Trump’s success has partly come from his zig-zag rejection of corporate pleas for a bigger flood of imported white collar and blue collar workers.

In recent days, Trump has been using his Twitter account to tout his wage benefits for Americans. “Our economy is doing great. Wages rising for the first time in may, many years. People are getting one job instead of two or three,” he said in a January 1 tweet where hs also pushed hard for better border security:

We need, however, a border, If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. we don’t want drug traffickers, or human traffickers, or illegal people with criminal records.

Even the president’s Never Trump enemies are beginning to realize that American voters want higher wages.

“I think the Republican Party … we definitely need to be in the higher real wages business,” said Mike Murphy, the California-based political consultant who worked for Gov. Jeb Bush in 2016 and many other establishment GOP candidates, including Sen. John McCain.  “Real wages have been stagnant for so long, [voters] think the American Dream is now gone,” Murphy said at a December event in Washington D.C.

In contrast, Romney’s op-ed urged the public to accepts policies — “align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices” — which do help grow a bigger national economy, but not bigger per-person wages.

Romney also urged Americans to accept migration and to subordinate their own financial interests to the guidance of corporate leaders and government legislators:

We must attract the best talent to America’s service and the best innovators to America’s economy … In an innovation age, Americans excel … The people of this great land will eschew the politics of anger and fear if they are summoned to the responsibility by leaders in homes, in churches, in schools, in businesses, in government — who raise our sights and respect the dignity of every child of God — the ideal that is the essence of America.

Through 2018, as wages nudge upwards, business groups have urged Trump to increase the supply of foreign white-collar and blue-collar workers. In December, for example, the Conference Board reported:

We expect labor markets to continue to tighten in the coming years, which will only apply more wage and price pressures across the economy. Industries that employ large shares of blue-collar workers, such as agriculture, mining, utilities, construction, manufacturing, transportation, accommodation and food services, repair, maintenance, and personal care services, are strongly affected. As baby boomers continue to retire, the number of people without a bachelor’s degree in the working-age population is projected to rapidly shrink through 2030.

 

Nationwide, the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor of blue-collar and white-collar employees.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland.

 

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