Trump + Function of Federal Government

Yet again proving that Trump is not a conservative, check out his answer to a question at CNN's town hall last night:

Q: "In your opinion, what are the top 3 functions of the United States Government"

A: (Paraphrase) National Security, Healthcare, Education

Does any conservative (or libertarian) believe the federal government should oversee healthcare and education? Nearly all Republicans believe healthcare and education would benefit from less federal government intrusion, not more.

I understand it's too late now, that the train has already left the station, but how is it this man is leading the Republican primary?  Add to the fact he never discusses the proper role of the federal government, its limitations, or the importance of the Constitution as a guiding framework.

So disappointing.  In fairness, at the 2:20 mark, right after he says the government should provide housing (?), when Anderson Cooper asks him if the power to oversee education should devolve to states, he says 'absolutely', then babels on about 'concept of the country'.  This continues to reinforce my belief that he doesn't value federalism and limited federal government - he sees all levels of government as a single force.  Either that, or he's making it up as he goes along. Either way, it's not good for those who support a restrained federal government that ensures freedom for all.

70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A Job

Only those unfamiliar with the laws of supply/demand are surprised by this story.


70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A Job
States nationwide are beginning to join the ‘Fight for $15.’ My job experience in Seattle, Washington helps illustrate why that’s a bad idea.

By Mitch Hall
March 29, 2016

Over the weekend, lawmakers and labor unions in California, the nation’s most populous state, reached a tentative agreement to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of the next several years.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown had opposed prior legislative proposals over the issue, but finally acquiesced after labor unions garnered enough support last week to qualify an initiative for the Nov. 8 ballot. The deal still has to go through the state legislature, but most anticipate legislators will approve it, thus avoiding the costly campaigning that would result from a squabble at the ballot box.

California’s compromise comes as part of a growing national movement to hike up minimum wages across the county. Indeed, over the past two years, a whole host of states and cities have rapidly pushed through legislation to raise their base pay, likely in response to President Obama’s repeated calls for higher wages.

Twenty-nine states have minimum wages that exceed the federally mandated $7.25 per hour. Heading into the 2016 election, the issue remains hotly contested and politically potent, with Republican presidential candidates in fierce opposition to, and Democratic candidates in strong support of, a dramatic increase in the federal minimum wage.

While many cities have forced local employers to pay artificially higher wages, the issue remains far from settled. Just last month, for instance, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill prohibiting Alabama towns from increasing their wages above the state’s, a move that came in response to the Birmingham City Council voting to raise their city’s base pay to $10.10 an hour.

In stark contrast to the reaction from California, many have since decried Alabama’s bill (Hillary Clinton’s campaign even characterized it as “disturbing“). Yet while opposition to wage hikes may be politically unpopular, more states should consider adopting laws like Bentley’s before it’s too late. As California’s deal demonstrates, the “fight for $15” is moving beyond just cities and towns. It now has the power to influence policy at the state level.

Jobless in Seattle

My opposition to minimum wage increases comes as a direct result of my own experience searching for jobs as a new resident of Seattle, Washington, a city that currently has one of the highest minimum wages in the nation. In June 2014, the Seattle City Council, composed of just nine members, unanimously voted to increase the city’s base pay to a whopping $15 an hour, to be gradually implemented over the course of several years.

I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle.

On January 1, 2016, the newly mandated minimum wage rose to $13 for larger companies (those that have more than 500 employees in the United States), and $10.50 for smaller employers (those with fewer than 500 employees in the United States). On top of this, Washington state law now requires businesses to adhere to this minimum even for tipped workers, a rule that only six other states have on the books.

In December, I found myself needing a break from college, for a variety of reasons. So at the close of last semester, I decided (rather impulsively, as young people are wont to do) to take my spring semester off from the College of William and Mary and move out west to try my luck in Seattle, a place I had only visited once before.

My parents, although grateful to have one less semester of ridiculously high out-of-state tuition to pay for, let me know that I’d need to fund the venture myself. I had secured an internship in the Seattle area, but it was unpaid, so I knew I’d have to find additional part-time work very quickly.

Having a combined two years of serving experience and close to five years of total experience in the customer and food services industries (which is literally as much as you can ask for from a 20-year-old college student), I assumed I’d be able to find a restaurant gig in no time. So, after reassuring my parents all would be well in the financial department, I boarded a plane in Philly a few weeks later and made the move.

Yet seven weeks and more than 70 job applications later, I still have yet to land a part-time, minimum wage job. I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle, filling out applications and inquiring about job opportunities at any restaurant, coffee shop, retail store, or other service-oriented establishment I can find.

Having squandered all of the money I had saved to get myself through what I thought would be a brief job-hunting period, I now find myself faced with the reality that if I don’t find work very, very soon, I’ll have to cut my break short and move back to the East Coast.

Higher Wages Mean Higher Stakes

At first, I was utterly dumbfounded by my lack of success, and figured only bad luck was to blame. After all, I had been hired at every single one of my past serving jobs within only a day or two of searching and applying. I’d have to find something in Seattle eventually, I thought; I’m young, competent, and college-educated, and serving is by no means a highly skilled occupation that requires degrees or extensive training. I know how to make a good impression with prospective employers, and I already have years of experience in the food services industry. What more could these people want?

Employers, especially in the restaurant and food services industries, are far less willing to take chances on who they hire with so much money on the line.

But soon enough it became clear, through talking with potential employers and local college students also trying to find work, that my failure to land a job was likely due, at least in large part, to Seattle’s absurdly high minimum wage.

Employers, especially in the restaurant and food services industries, are far less willing to take chances on who they hire with so much money on the line. I was shocked to learn that some restaurants—comparable in quality to the ones that hired me with little or no experience on the East Coast—here required a minimum of three to five years of restaurant experience, even for support staff positions like hosts and bussers. I had multiple managers glance at my resume, see that my past jobs were seasonal or temporary, and tell me upfront that unless I could commit to at least a year of labor, they simply wouldn’t hire me, despite my qualifications.

Contrast this with my past experience working in Pennsylvania and Virginia, states that have a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for non-tipped workers and a base pay of $2.13 per hour for positions that do receive tips. To the uninformed observer, this situation looks a lot worse than the progressive system Washington has put in place, and admittedly, after taxes most of my paychecks came out to little more than $0.

But in reality this wasn’t an issue, because the tips easily made up for the hourly wage I was missing. Working 30 hours a week, I was able to bring home around $500 per week, which translates to about $17 per hour and $26,000 a year. According to the Foundation for Economic Education, this is just about enough to keep a family of four above the poverty line. That’s only part-time work. A full-time server in your average successful restaurant would be able to make even more than that.

Working 30 hours a week, I was able to bring home around $500 per week, which translates to about $17 per hour and $26,000 a year.

Restaurateurs in states with the $2.13 per hour minimum wage requirement have much more opportunity for variety in their hiring practices, for the cost to train someone is little, and the tip-based salary incentivizes individual employees to improve on their own while allowing the business to keep most of its profits. They can usually hire year-round, and can afford to choose from a much more diverse applicant pool. This is likely why I was able to secure my first restaurant job, when I was 18 years old and had no prior serving experience, as a summer employee in a busy Mexican restaurant.

Even for other industries dominated by minimum-wage jobs, such as retail, maintenance, construction, and transportation, a $7.25 hourly rate allows for similar hiring diversity, and also enables a company to take on twice the amount of employees as it would be able to in a $15 minimum-wage state. It should surprise no one, for instance, that nearly all of the states with the most minimum-wage employees are in the South, an area where only two states—Florida ($8.05 per hour) and Arkansas ($8.50 per hour)—have minimum wages above the federally mandated $7.25.

Given this, it makes sense that Seattle employers forced to pay the new minimum wage even to tipped employees only feel comfortable hiring highly qualified prospects who can prove on paper they’ll be a safe long-term investment. These restaurateurs and store managers don’t want to risk hiring a relatively inexperienced young adult they’ll have to spend precious time and money training, and who may easily grow complacent in the job once he realizes he’ll get paid $13 an hour no matter the extent of his stay or the quality of his job performance.

Who Makes the Minimum Wage?

Higher minimum wages favor people who have already made a career out of these jobs—or, in other words, the very people minimum wage jobs are not intended for.

Political pundits and proponents of minimum wage increases predicate their arguments on the false notion that the majority of minimum wage-workers are poor breadwinners who depend exclusively on their jobs for survival. Indeed, to garner support for reform, the Left often cites the fact that a family of three or four cannot live on the $15,080 annual income a full-time employee theoretically makes with the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

The typical minimum wage worker is someone like me: a young adult who’s working part-time to make money supplemental to an existing (family) income.

Democrats frequently tout this point and deploy their new favorite term “living wage” to purposefully obscure the reality that most minimum wage workers do not, in fact, rely on their entry-level jobs to fully support themselves or their families.

The most recent statistics by the Pew Research Center support this assertion. According to the 2014 research, 50.4 percent of all minimum-wage workers are ages 16 to 24, 64 percent work only part-time, and 55 percent are employed in the leisure and hospitality industry (including food preparation and other service-related jobs). The majority are white (77 percent), and well over half (62 percent) are women. In other words, the typical minimum wage worker is someone like me: a young adult who’s working part-time to make money supplemental to an existing (family) income.

The overall share of hourly paid workers earning minimum wage or less has also significantly decreased over the past few decades: in 1979, they represented 7.9 percent of all wage and salary workers, whereas today they represent only 2.6 percent of that demographic. With such a small percentage of the working population earning base pay or below, it’s unlikely that increasing the federal minimum wage by 50 percent or 100 percent would do much at all to improve the overall poverty rate.

Minimum Wage Hikes Hurt Those They’re Intended to Help

Basic economic logic lends credit to arguments against minimum wage hikes. If employers now have to pay their employees twice the amount they used to, they have two options: reduce the number of their employees, or raise the prices of their products—a move that drives down business and thus leads to job elimination anyway.

If employers now have to pay their employees twice the amount they used to, they have two options: reduce the number of their employees, or raise the prices of their products.

In Seattle, this is exactly what’s been happening. As research from the widely respected American Enterprise Institute explains, early evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that “since last April when the first minimum wage hike took effect: a) the city’s employment has fallen by more than 11,000, b) the number of unemployed workers has risen by nearly 5,000, and c) the city’s jobless rate has increased by more than 1 percentage point.”

Thanks to the growing cost of labor, fast food prices are currently on the rise in Seattle, and restaurants here and in other cities are now considering getting rid of tipping altogether, proposing they instead increase their prices by 20 percent. While this might help restaurateurs pay their employees the new mandatory minimum, I can say from my own experience it would also likely dis-incentivize servers and diminish the quality of service.

Wage hikes not only force more people to compete for fewer positions, but they also pit people like me against older, more seasoned, and perhaps more qualified individuals who look a lot more attractive to Seattle employers.

I’m a young, educated, white male who comes from an upper-middle-class background. In other words, I’m exactly the type of person that society supposedly favors over all the rest. If it’s this difficult for me to land an entry-level, minimum-wage position, then what must it be like for more disadvantaged individuals, the very people compassionate liberals likely have in mind when they advocate for a spike in the minimum wage? Surely the poor inner-city teenager lacking education and job experience, or the struggling single mother who needs to work much more than just part-time to support her children, will lose out to other applicants even faster than I did.

The fact that cities like Seattle, and now states like California, can freely experiment with economic policy demonstrates the virtues of our nation’s federalist system. However, our local laboratories of democracy aren’t always foolproof. Sometimes, they get it wrong.

And I’ll bet my non-existent income that in time, the recent minimum wage hikes in cities and states throughout the country will provide further proof of this reality. Alas, in the meantime, my job search continues.

Healthcare costs rising faster than incomes

Remember when the President promised his healthcare law would save $2,500 per family?

Apparently that was about as true as when he said "If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan".

On Obamacare’s sixth anniversary, report finds premiums up 28 percent in five years

BY: Ali Meyer
March 23, 2016 2:20 pm

Health insurance premiums have increased faster than wages and inflation in recent years, rising an average of 28 percent from 2009 to 2014 despite the enactment of Obamacare, according to a report from Freedom Partners.

President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, and Wednesday is the law’s sixth anniversary.

The Obama administration expressed concern in 2009 about skyrocketing health care premiums in a report entitled, “The Burden of Health Insurance Premium Increases on American Families.” They were concerned that premiums had increased by 5.5 percent from 2008 to 2009.

However, from 2010 to 2011 in the first year after Obamacare was enacted, premiums increased by 9.4 percent.

“In 2009, when the [Executive Office of the President] issued its report, states had seen premiums increase on average by 30 percent between 2004 and 2009,” states the Freedom Partners report. “But since 2009, health insurance premiums have continued to grow faster than wages in nearly every state, averaging a 28 percent increase from 2009 to 2014, resulting in a greater amount of disposable income being consumed by rising premiums.”

According to the report, while premiums increased by 28 percent from 2009 to 2014, wages increased by only 7.8 percent. From 2004 to 2009 when premiums increased by 30 percent, wages increased by only 12.2 percent.

The data also finds that health care costs have exceeded the rate of inflation. “The average annual cost of a family’s employer-sponsored health insurance policy was $17,545 in 2015, which marks a 4.2 percent increase from the 2014 average of $16,834, while the inflation rate remained low at 0.1 percent,” states the report. “With health care costs still rising faster than inflation six years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, it is clear that the law is not helping lower the burden of health care expenses for American families.”

Americans can expect their health care costs to rise again in 2017. According to Stephen Parente, a scholar at the University of Minnesota, each type of health care plan on the exchanges can expect to see an average premium increase of 7.3 percent for families and 11 percent for individuals.

“The Administration claimed the ACA would bend the cost curve, but our report shows it bent in the wrong direction—premiums didn’t slow down under the Affordable Care Act, they sped up,” said Nathan Nascimento, senior policy adviser at Freedom Partners. “No wonder the White House is trying to change the national conversation away from health care costs. By their own standards, the Affordable Care Act has failed.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Government: Is it Ever Big Enough?

Garry Kasparov: Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism. I Lived Through It.

GARRY KASPAROV

Why my rant against the Democratic candidate’s prescription for America went viral.

2016 seems like a strange time to be arguing the merits of socialism in an American presidential campaign. But it’s also strange for the prospective leaders of the free world to be talking about the KKK and their appendages, so clearly this year is not like any other. While the latter topics are, thankfully, beyond my purview, I have a great deal of interest in socialism.

Last week I expressed some of these thoughts on Facebook after hearing a clip of “democratic socialist” candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday. This was already a rarity, considering how little time the networks have left after their blanket coverage of Donald Trump’s latest outrages. My post on the nature of socialism was 113 words long, a quick response to critics of a cartoon I had posted of Bernie Sanders wearing a baseball cap reading “Make America Greece Again.”

My goal was to remind people that Americans talking about socialism in the 21st century was a luxury paid for by the successes of capitalism in the 20th. And that while inequality is a huge problem, the best way to increase everyone’s share of pie is to make the pie bigger, not to dismantle the bakery. Much to my surprise, my little rant went viral, as the saying goes. Instead of the usual few hundred Facebook shares, this paragraph quickly reached tens of thousands. By the next morning it had reached several million people, more than any of the day’s political posts by the leading candidates. A week later and it has over 3,000 comments, 57,000 shares, and a 9.3 million reach that is in the category usually reserved for photos of pop stars and kitten videos.

My conclusion that “the idea that the solution [to inequality] is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd” apparently had great resonance, and I think I know why. There is a growing consensus that America has deep troubles, and no one can agree on solutions. Everyone agrees that Washington should change, and some want the government to do much more while others want it to do much less. Many of the traditional economic numbers say that America is doing fine, and yet polls say that Americans—especially Sanders supporters—are angry about the present and fearful about the future.

I often talk about the need to restore a vision of America as a positive force in the world, a force for liberty and peace. The essential complement to this is having big positive dreams at home as well, of restoring America’s belief in ambition and risk, of innovation and exploration, of free markets and free people. America transformed the 20th century in its image with its unparalleled success. American technology created the modern world while American culture infused it and American values inspired it.

In recent decades that storyline has flipped. The tireless work ethic and spirit of risk-taking and sacrifice have slowly eroded. This complacency was accelerated by the end of the Cold War and it has proved very difficult to overcome in the absence of an existential enemy to compete with. The booming innovation engine of job creation has fallen behind the accelerating pace of technology that replaces workers. The result has been slower growth, stagnant wages, and the steady shift of wealth from labor to capital. In such situations many people turn to the government for help and the siren song of socialism grows louder.

I respect and even like Bernie Sanders. He’s a charismatic speaker and a passionate believer in his cause. He believes deeply in what he is saying, which is more than what can be said about nearly every other 2016 candidate, or about politicians in general. I say this while disagreeing vehemently with nearly everything he says about policy. The “revolution” rhetoric of Senator Sanders has struck a chord with many Americans, especially the young voters who are realizing that their own lives are unlikely to match the opportunities and wealth of their parents and grandparents. They are being left behind in a rapidly changing world. It is a helpless, hopeless feeling.

The problem is with the proposed solutions. A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them. Of course Senator Sanders does not want to turn America into a totalitarian state like the one I grew up in. But it’s a valuable example of the inevitable failure of a state-run economy and distribution system. (Check in on Venezuela for a more recent example.) Once you give power to the government it is nearly impossible to get it back, and it will be used in ways you cannot expect.

The USSR collapsed because it couldn’t compete over time, despite its massive resources and devout ideology. The Soviets put a man in space before America but couldn’t keep up the pace against an innovating, free-market competitor. My Facebook post went around the world on technology created in America. The networks, the satellites, the software, nearly every ingredient in every mobile device and desktop computer, was invented in the USA. It is not a coincidence that the most capitalist country in the world created all these things. Innovation requires freedom of thought, freedom of capital, and people who believe in changing the world.

Yes, the free market can be cruel and it is by definition unequal. It has winners and losers. It also sparks the spirit of creativity that humanity desperately needs to flourish in our ever-increasing billions. Failure is an essential part of innovation and the free market. Of every 10 new companies, perhaps nine will fail in brutal Darwinian competition. A centrally-planned economy cannot imitate this engine of creative destruction because you cannot plan for failure. You cannot predestine which two college dropouts in a garage will produce the next Apple.

A popular rebuttal is to invoke the socialist leanings of several European countries with high living standards, especially in Scandinavia. Why can’t America be more like happy Denmark, with its high taxes and giant public sector, or at least more like France? Even the more pro-free-market United Kingdom has national health care, after all. First off, comparing relatively small, homogeneous populations to the churning, ocean-spanning American giant is rarely useful. And even the most socialist of the European countries only became wealthy enough to embrace redistribution after free-market success made them rich. Still, why cannot America follow this path if that is what the people want? What is the problem if American voters are willing to accept higher taxes in exchange for greater security in the embrace of the government?

The answer takes us back to all those inventions America has produced decade after decade. As long as Europe had America taking risks, investing ambitiously, attracting the world’s dreamers and entrepreneurs, and yes, being unequal, it could benefit from the results without making the same sacrifices. Add to that the incalculable windfall of not having to spend on national defense thanks to America’s massive investment in a global security umbrella. America doesn’t have the same luxury of coasting on the ambition and sacrifice of another country.

Who will be America’s America? What other nation could attract the brightest students, the biggest investors, the most ambitious entrepreneurs in the same way? Germany? Russia? Japan? China? India? Each may take over leadership in some areas if America continues to falter, but none is equipped to lead the world in innovation the way the United States has since Thomas Edison’s day. None possesses the combination of political and economic freedoms and the human and natural resources required.

The government does have a role in addressing rising inequality. I turn not to Denmark or Venezuela or, god forbid, to the Soviet Union. Instead let us look to the last great battle between labor and capital in America, between public and private power. Just over 100 years ago, President Teddy Roosevelt spoke loudly and used his big stick against some of the world’s largest corporations when they were abusing their monopoly power. His successor, fellow Republican William Taft, continued the antitrust mission, at least initially.

Both men dealt with critics from industry and Wall Street who called their use of government power against them “socialism” and both answered eloquently. In his 1908 State of the Union address, Roosevelt spoke about “the huge wealth that has been accumulated by a few individuals of recent years” being possible “only by the improper use of the modern corporation,” and that these corporations “lend themselves to fraud and oppression than any device yet evolved in the human brain.” He also warned against the accrual of unaccountable political power in the hands of “men who work in secret, whose very names are unknown to the common people.” You can easily imagine Teddy in the bully pulpit today calling for the breakup of the big banks and ending their cozy relationship with Washington.

To give credit, Senator Sanders supports breaking up the giant banking institutions that dominate American finance and politics in a way that would evoke jealousy from John Pierpont Morgan himself. However, Sanders’s socialist policies would replace banks that are too big to fail with a government that is too big to succeed.

Taft warned about exactly this in his 1911 State of the Union. Busting the trusts was to free the market, not to insert the government into it. It was necessary to break up Standard Oil and American Tobacco in order to preserve capitalism, not to institute socialism. Taft said, “The anti-trust act is the expression of the effort of a freedom-loving people to preserve equality of opportunity. It is the result of the confident determination of such a people to maintain their future growth by preserving uncontrolled and unrestricted the enterprise of the individual, his industry, his ingenuity, his intelligence, and his independent courage.”

Bravo! Beautiful words and an even more beautiful sentiment that is deserving of its own Facebook meme! Unfortunately, today’s progressive solution would instead be to raise Standard Oil’s taxes and those of its wealthiest shareholders in order to pay for more services, like free college and health care. It would have been an acceptable choice for many, but the American 20th century would never have happened.


Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author of Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

Bernie Sanders' Free Trade Mythology

Bernie Sanders' Free Trade Mythology

By Steve Chapman
March 10, 2016

Bernie Sanders' upset victory in Michigan came just two days after he stood on the debate stage in the perennially beleaguered city of Flint, Michigan, and decried the economic condition of the surrounding area. He put the blame where he, like Donald Trump, often puts it: on free trade.

"Do you know that in 1960, Detroit, Michigan, was one of the wealthiest cities in America?" he demanded. "Flint, Michigan, was a prosperous city. But then what happened is corporate America said, 'Why do I want to pay somebody in Michigan a living wage when I could pay slave wages in Mexico or China?'"

A pre-debate tweet from Sanders featured bleak photos of abandoned buildings and said, "The people of Detroit know the real cost of Hillary Clinton's free trade policies."

Michigan has seen more than its share of economic trouble, but the senator from Vermont is not the guy to explain it. The decline he lamented and the causes he cited didn't come close to coinciding. Many vacant buildings in the Motor City were vacant when Clinton was practicing law in Little Rock.

Michael Moore's documentary film "Roger & Me," about the calamitous shutdown of General Motors plants in Flint, came out in 1989 -- more than four years before the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect and long before China exported much of anything. Detroit lost more than a third of its population between 1960 and 1990.
Article Continues BelowA generation ago, the auto industry was competing not with companies in Mexico or China but with those in Japan. Toyota, Honda and other Japanese companies took sales away from the Big Three, particularly after the energy crisis of the 1970s, by offering cars that were more reliable and fuel-efficient.

They won over American consumers at a time when trade was far from free. President Ronald Reagan protected U.S. automakers by forcing "voluntary" limits on Japanese auto sales. Japanese trucks faced a 25 percent import duty -- which is still in effect.

The other changes that hurt the Michigan auto industry were not the product of trade agreements. One was the migration of production to other states, particularly those with right-to-work laws that impeded the powerful United Auto Workers union. Today most U.S. factories operated by Ford and General Motors are located outside of Michigan -- as is every plant operated by foreign automakers.

The other change came in the form of automation. Many of the jobs that have vanished in American car factories haven't moved abroad; they've gone to robots and other labor-saving machinery. Since 2000, when domestic auto employment peaked, the number of workers required to produce a given number of vehicles has fallen by more than one-third.

Breaking down trade barriers would actually help the American auto industry and those on the assembly lines. One major attraction of building cars in Mexico is that it has free trade agreements with 45 countries -- while the U.S. has free trade deals with just 20. Exporting to most of the world is easier there than here.

Bernard Swiecki, an analyst at the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, told Business Alabama why Audi recently decided to put a factory in Mexico instead of the U.S.: "If they export it, they save $4,500 per vehicle in tariffs they don't have to pay."

Sanders said Sunday that American workers shouldn't have to compete with "people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour." He's greatly exaggerating. U.S. automakers there pay $8 to $10 an hour.

That's a lot less than American autoworkers earn, but the wage gap doesn't matter as much as you might think. U.S. plants still roll out three times as many cars and trucks as their Mexican counterparts.

Sanders falls in a long tradition of trying to wall our economy off from the world. The AFL-CIO opposed the 1987 free trade agreement with Canada. The Vermont socialist would deny American consumers the better products and lower prices that such accords provide.

Those benefits are especially important to people of limited means, who spend a disproportionate share of their income on necessities. Yet many of these people have cast their ballots for Sanders and Trump.

If Michiganders went to Wal-Mart or Home Depot tomorrow and found the shelves stripped of everything made abroad, they would quickly grasp the upside of free trade. If either of the people they chose for president gets to the White House, that realization may come, but too late.