Why are Cubans so poor? They’ve done very well in the U.S., where emigres from the perpetually recessed country have risen to the top in sports, business and politics. Yet in their own country Cubans are desperately impoverished.

After a hotly contested — and highly expensive — 2017 election cycle, the Democrats have taken the governor’s mansions in both Virginia and New Jersey. In both cases, it was a sweeping victory, with Ralph Northam winning nearly 54 percent of the Virginia vote and Ryan Murphy winning 56 percent of the New Jersey vote.

You read the headline right. In 2010, the gradual decline of the so-called death tax reached a full repeal for that year and that year only. That year just so happened to be the year my grandfather, the patriarch of our family’s small manufacturing business, lost his long and painful battle with cancer. Had we been so fortunate to have him for another year, we would have lost everything he worked so hard to build. My father was the president of the company at the time, a firm specializing in creating composite equipment. You’ve probably never heard of the composites industry, let alone our company, but I guarantee you’ve used products our machines made. You probably took a shower in a tub made with our equipment today. There are countless applications of composites, from bathtubs, boats, oil and gas, infrastructure, and defense.

Here’s a truly rhetorical question: who among us would reject higher compensation? Our work is our expression of our desire to get, and higher pay is the path to getting more in return for what we do each day.