Wake Up Call for my Friend Beto

I was at the Dallas Rally Against Fear

Beto has been courageous and bold in his stand with LGBT, Immigrants, Uninsured (health), Veterans, Educators, Education, New Economy Jobs and Environmentalist and spoken against and for control of assault weapons, unfettered wealth inequality and pharmaceuticals. He has stood as boldly as I could ask against fear and divisiveness exploited through demagoguery and impeachable behaviors by the sitting president.

The Dallas Rally Against Fear was wonderful across all these areas. Missing from the rally was a signature attribute I have come to expect from Beto — new and distinctive insight that differentiates him and energizes the constituency that crosses age groups, economic demographics, race, gender, political party or any other stereotype.

He has never inventively or unconventionally addressed the problems that President Obama warned him about — the “rust belt” of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania with an actual plan to counteract Donald Trump’s empty promises and rhetoric of doing something for the infrastructure, manufacturing and living wage jobs in the “old” economy as we transition to the new.

Some candidates proposed a straight wealth transfer. Tax the 1% and pass out the proceeds to the less wealthy. He has called this punitive and suggested this strays too far from the economic incentives of innovation and ingenuity — and rightfully so.

Worker rights, especially higher wages, through legislative action has a unavoidable downside of passing the wages forward in the pricing losing global competitiveness.

Let us do that most American of unifying activities and join together and work together. Apply a new progressive tax code that doesn’t directly redistribute wealth but instead subsidizes traditional infrastructure projects to insure traditional skills and hard work can be paid a living wage.

It’s true chip factories employ few people — robotics handle the repetitive motions. But, but, but — those chip factories have to be built by steel workers, air conditioning experts and apprentices, wielders, robotic assemblers, asphalt pad workers, electrical distribution and substation builders, plumbing and water handlers, backup generation facilities, telemetry installation and assembly. And, and, and — the work doesn’t end when construction is over. All of that infrastructure has to be proactively maintained and updated.

All infrastructure works this way. Furniture manufacturing, electric automotive component parts production, appliance component parts and assembly — the list is endless.

Adolf Hitler was Time Magazine “Person of the Year” in 1938 for his “economic miracle” in Nazi Germany. Hitler’s economic advisers accomplished the “miracle” through subsidizing infrastructure. Add the Yankee ingenuity of subsidizing infrastructure that propels the new economy so that the interim fix is self perpetuating.

President Trump has pursued divisive and inhumane behaviors that echo some of the Third Reich, it’s time the boldest and most inventive of the 2020 Democratic candidates, Beto O’Rourke, borrowed a brighter and loftier page from a government sponsored capitalistic style of economic medicine and applied it to 21st century America.