Thanks to the Tea Party movement and an environment unusually hostile to career politicians, Republicans nominated many unconventional candidates this year. That isn’t meant as a comment on their ideology, but on their background.
A fair number of schoolteachers, surgeons, dentists, exterminators, farmers, car dealers, a roofing contractor, and even a lumberjack (sort of) are vying for seats in Congress.
Democrats have come up with several messages for dealing with such a motley assortment of challengers. Some of them have easily exploited messy divorces, or bankruptcies, for example. But the least compelling argument against these unconventional Republican candidates is that they want to outsource jobs. The basis of this claim is that these candidates won’t commit to increasing taxes on businesses that do.
There are glaring flaws in the argument itself: You don’t stop businesses from fleeing our ludicrous corporate tax rates by raising taxes on them. But more importantly, I’ve never been sold on the idea that Catholic schoolteachers and ophthalmologists are the ones outsourcing jobs. That’s something politicians do, and something our current officeholders have done plenty of in the last two years.
Recently, General Electric shuttered its light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., and sent the jobs of its 200 workers overseas to China.
Was it because of tax breaks? No. Actually, it was because of the energy bill passed by the Democratic Congress.
The bill, which banned the incandescent light bulbs those workers were making, is an economic central planner’s dream. It spends several pages describing the precise shape, size, voltage, and brightness of light bulbs, and carefully outlines 22 different exceptions to the rules governing light bulbs.
Out of 190 co-sponsors, 188 were Democrats.
In Panama City, Florida, about 500 jobs at Sallie Mae have disappeared this year. In Northeast Pennsylvania, 1,100 similar jobs are at risk.
The reason? As part of the health care bill, Democrats in Congress federalized student loan programs, meaning that private loan servicing jobs are being eliminated.
The new arrangement certainly has some merits, but not for people living in the districts of Reps. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., and Chris Carney, D-Pa. All three voted for it anyway. To show their support for President Obama, they outsourced their constituents’ jobs to Washington, D.C.
The stimulus package cost taxpayers $814 billion, with a few billion thrown in to produce wind turbines for American wind farms. But a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that a decent chunk of that green energy stimulus money is going to create jobs in other countries — mainly China.
“[A]s many as 40 percent of the wind farms built in the first year of the program installed turbines and other equipment manufactured overseas,” The New York Times reported this week. Outsourcing may seem bad, but it’s really worse when the taxpayer’s money is actually shipped overseas to subsidize it.
And then there’s Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. When Arizona passed its controversial immigration law in June, Grijalva responded by calling for a boycott against his own state – that is, against his constituents’ employers and businesses. He’s been very successful, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Yuma, at the west end of his district, unemployment ticked upward between July and August to just above 30 percent. That’s what you call an effective boycott.
Next Tuesday, we’ll see whether the voters believe the Democrats’ ads about outsourcing jobs. If not, those voters will probably outsource a lot of Capitol Hill jobs to Republicans next Tuesday.
David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
