How to revive the middle class

By Cesar Lumba, Las Vegas

Saturday, Dec. 6, 2014 | 2:02 a.m.

America awaits with a mixture of hope and consternation the transition of power from Democrats to Republicans in the Senate. Is compromise possible, or are we in for another two years of dysfunction?

Crisis is opportunity, and there’s no better time than today to ride four of our major crises to a better place.

They are: the hollowing-out of our manufacturing base leading to the decline of our middle class and the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of Americans; the repatriation of multinational companies’ trillions in foreign profits to the U.S.; the Keystone pipeline construction; andglobal warming.

My recommended solutions:

• Congress should pass a law that reduces the tax on profits from foreign operations of major multinational companies — to 15 percent — provided the money is brought back to the U.S. and is used directly to bring some manufacturing back to America.

To provide impetus to this compromise, President Barack Obama must threaten higher tariffs on products of manufacturers that have abandoned America en masse since the turn of the century.

• Obama should allow construction of the Keystone pipeline provided the expected increases in carbon emissions will be offset by reductions in carbon footprints of the companies that stand to benefit from its construction.

The two new laws will create new manufacturing and construction jobs and revive the American middle class. They also will usher in a new era of compromise between fossil energy producers and the environmentalists.