Henry Ford had the great idea of paying
his workers a good wage so that they could become consumers of the product he
was making, cars. And it worked. Today we seem to have lost that common piece
of sense.
Today a couple with 3 fulltime minimum
wage jobs cannot make ends meet. That is a sad commentary on our economic
system. Today many two income families do not have the buying power of a single
income family before. Minimum wage buying power is now less than it was in the
50’s. The inequality of wealth is like that of the 20’s before the Great Depression.
All of this taking place while our economy has grown. Working hard to improve
your life just doesn’t do it anymore.
Sixty per cent of the workforce make
their living by hourly wages and 80% in production or nonsupervisory work.
These are the one that have suffered the most. Our infrastructure is crumbling,
we have the biggest debt and were are not fixing the problems. We spend less on
research and development and our educational system is not competitive with other
developed countries.
During the Reagan administration was
our longest time without an increase in minimum wage. He was also the union
busting president; remember the air traffic controllers fired. And this has
continued. Studies show than when union wages increase there is an overall
benefit to the economy. But today people are too worried about losing their job
to bargain for higher wages; they will just send your job abroad. The middle
class is shrinking and more are working at poverty level jobs.
When FDR instituted the minimum wage he
talked about a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Now we complain it will
hurt small businesses. If that is the case there are a lot of small business
that just are competitive if they keep their workers in poverty.
So where does the money go? It goes to
the rich folk. Executives in corporations have pretty much doubled their share
of company revenue in the last decade. The rich are getting richer while the
rest are getting poorer unlike Reagan’s promised that the tide would lift all
boats. What we have is a type of greed at the top that is not tolerated in
other industrialized nations. We have the great inequality of these nations and
the highest rates of poverty.
Other nations have invested in going
green and thus developed their economies. We are also the only industrialized
country that does not have universal health care. As a result we have higher child
mortality rates and a lower living standard.
All of this has contributed to being
extreme high levels of personal debt. Thus the mortgage crisis, huge college
debts, and retirement losses.
We need to invest in green technology,
provide universal health care (taking a great burden off small businesses) and
quit pouring money into the pharmaceutical companies protected from competition
by the government as well as insurance companies.
If we do not up the wages for common
people this country will continue to have greater and greater problems. But for
now the rich seem to own the government to the detriment of the nation.
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