Emil Guillermo: One minority view of the Tax-cut deal

If you come from immigrant stock,  here’s one way to look at this $858 billion tax cut plan Obama and the Republicans are proposing.

Consider how you, your parents or grandparents came to America for opportunity. But now the capitalists here have gotten smarter. They’re shipping jobs back to where we came from.  That’s the American Dream now. You stay put, our jobs will migrate to you.

You see, you never had to immigrate in the first place. The New America is global. It’s wherever you are. 

In the eight years of the Bush Administration, 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost as plants were shut down all over the U.S.  Opportunities? If you’re Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Indian, or from any other low wage country, it’s right under you nose. Just wait, America will be there and pay you in your native currency.

If you heard Sen.Bernie Sanders nearly nine-hour speech last Friday, you heard his lament. In 2000, there were 17,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. By 2008 there were less than 12,000.  Since the beginning of World War II, the U.S. has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs–a 29 percent reduction.

That’s just one of the reasons why so many people are out of work here.

And now those people  face  the indignity of being the pawns in this huge tax-cut game in Washington.

In order to get unemployment, the GOP wants to trade extension of benefits for the extension of the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy

That’s practically immoral.

An $858 billion  tax cut proposal is just insane given our $13.8 trillion national debt.

But this is the road advocates for the tax-cut deal us on.

Our jobs are gone, our people are unemployed, our future compromised.

If you’re in a Third World nation now, why would you ever want to come to America?

More on the tax cut bill on my blog at www.aaldef.org/blog