The Carroll Standard

Taylor: Jobs and Unemployment

Jobs and unemployment have emerged once again as the two main issues dominating this election. This reminds me of 1982 and 1984, when I first ran for Congress in both Baltimore and Harford Counties, when they were the very same, reflecting the recessions of those years.

In '82, I met workers at the Western Electric plant on Broening Highway in Baltimore County as they ate lunch in the company cafeteria. Two years later, they were all gone, the workers laid off, and the company shut down. I predicted then many of the problems that we are having now. One of the culprits is the cyclical "boom and bust" nature of the American economy.

Another this time is that we are at the end of the decade of the very foolishly enacted  Congressional "Bush tax cuts" of 2001 that have been an absolute disaster for the economy, giving as they did a tax "break" to the 2% of the wealthiest Americans who didn't need them, at the expense of the other 98% who did. That says it all, and were I in the United States Senate today, they would be allowed to expire, not reenacted. They should never have been passed at all. 2008 proved that!

Many Americans believe that the Obama economic stimulus program was a dud. I do not, but I do feel that it was largely misspent on Democratic pet projects that the leaders of the party in Washington wanted funded for many years and saw their chance with this. A friend of mine who recently died told me that he felt the stimulus money should've been paid to individual American taxpayers directly, and I believe that he was right, for we would've used that money to pay bills, putting it all back into our still weak economy.

That's the past! What about the future? By ending all of our current overseas wars and being far more wary in starting others, we can do just that: help American families and taxpayers directly. The same is true if we cancel all current and future aid to Israel, period, and ditto many of the other countries around the world that we've bankrolled since 1945. We could also start paying down our OWN national and personal debts that truly NEED tp be paid, period.  There are many more things that need to be done, and I'll be discussing those as well in the future. A stimulus paid directly to Americans is a START, however.

--Blaine Taylor, Democratic Candidate for United States Senate; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.