It is election season once again in the United States. This means that the two major parties will be vociferously attacking each others’ policies and claims of achievements in order to try and win votes. Due to the recent economic situation in the US, I expect that various claims about jobs will be made by both parties, with both of them trying to show that they have the policies to foster a healthy job market for the future. These claims really need to be addressed. While these claims will mostly be made by candidates for federal office, and distributists like to focus on the local community, the reality of our time is that federal programs and regulations do have a large impact on the ability to create jobs throughout the country, so we must deal with the situation we are actually facing.
We can expect that the Democrats will claim that they are pulling us out of the current situation of inflation by showing how many “new jobs” have been created in some recent amount of time. What they won’t really mention is how many jobs have been lost in the last four years, although we might expect the Republicans to bring that up. Although it has been a few years, a significant number of jobs were lost due to the COVID lock downs combined with the vaccine mandates across the country. To be fair, Republican hands are not completely clean on this issue, these mandates were implemented at the state level in states governed by both Republicans and Democrats. However, the real push for these mandates did come from the federal government, and the Democrats were in charge at the time. Additionally, the worst impact of these mandates were in states governed by Democrats who were unrelenting in trying to enforce them and maintained them longer than Republicans did.
It is estimated that, between the conditions of the lock downs and the vaccine mandates, around 20,000,000 jobs were lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. The policies forced on society only allowed large businesses like the “big box stores” and online businesses to survive. Between 25 and 35 percent of small businesses in the United States were lost. When the Democrats start talking about how many new jobs have been created, we should ask how many of those jobs are for large corporations. How many small businesses have been established in this so-called recovery? Another question that needs to be asked is the breakdown of full time versus part time jobs. It is hardly significant if a million new jobs have been created if most of those jobs represent part time employment replacing full time jobs that were lost.
When it comes to the Republicans, similar questions need to be asked. We know that part of the Republican plan will increase jobs by expanding domestic energy and fuel production and potentially imposing some tariffs to improve jobs in domestic industries. Do the Republicans have plans at state and local levels that will lift barriers to those who want to start small locally owned businesses? If they really want to present themselves as a more “populist” party responding to the every day needs of the working class, a platform completely abandoned by the Democrats, they really need to focus on this, and I’m not convinced that the majority of the Republican party has it in them to do it. Simply increasing jobs by helping big businesses get even bigger won’t really help local communities.
For those considering third parties, while it is unlikely to win in federal elections, we need to look at local candidates who may have a better chance of winning to see if their positions will foster the growth of small, independently owned, local businesses to help the local communities become economically sustainable. I don’t look to any political party to actually solve the economic and political problems we face, but the reality is that the various levels of government under which we live have a large impact on this. If you’re going to vote, you should consider these questions in your decisions.
Practical Distributism 