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Of COURSE it's a huge problem in the U.S..... the media just doesn't want to talk about it..! Or if it's ever mentioned at all, it's always 'illegal immigrants being exploited'. Well that's that's certainly wrong,, but what about U.S. CITIZENS being exploited..?? And yes that also includes educated, intelligent skilled workers...!! This is the issue that NO ONE wants to discuss.
I can personally say that I am caught in this trap.. and SO MANY people like myself, especially in their 30's-50's.. have worked hard their whole lives and NEVER asked for a handout... and have gone from crappy job to an even crappier job.. and it never gets better. We have been taught our whole lives 'work hard and you'll succeed'-- HA!! what a joke and a LIE that turned out to be! You don't succeed, you're just exploited and used. Your only 'reward' is you just get to keep working harder, for less pay. We've all worked hard and tried to work smart and keep ending up in one hopeless situation after another where our human dignity is shot to hale and our wages just keep going down, down, down.. while the cost of everything else goes up, up, UP. Wake up, America-- WORKING PEOPLE ARE SINKING FAST.
The naysayers can't give us that same old 'stop whining, I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps and you can too.. blah blah blah.' The problem can't be denied anymore. I never wanted to believe it-- but it's so clear to me now. The system is truly RIGGED. And our own govt was more or less abandoned us-- the middle and working-class CITIZENS of this country.
'Free market capitalism' has proven to be unsustainable. The rich and welfare-dependent non-working poor always get lots of help.. but those caught in the middle are being squeezed into extinction. You can't tell a society that they are FREE to be as greedy as they wanna be, with nothing to stop them, and expect to have any semblance of stability or an equal chance for all.
Here's an example-- take franchises for instance. They have grown without much regulation and gotten through all the legal loopholes.. they have created a situation where they are immune from all the labor laws that generations ago, worked and fought hard for- to provide basic quality of life for working AMERICANS. And the current laws have not caught up with the reality-- in fact, they do nothing but PROTECT them and allow them to continue getting away with exploitation and abuse. So if our OWN GOVT. (that we pay taxes to- and they are supposed to work for US!)- does not regulate our enforce laws that are supposed to protect workers- and both parties, the franchise and the parent franchise company, each say they are legally free from responsibility-- then WHO WILL....??? Answer: NO ONE. Meanwhile, the workers cling to their jobs, afraid to speak up about abuse because, of course, they'll lose their job. And soon you have a situation that is not unlike slavery. or at best, indentured servitude. because the owners/bosses can get away with whatever they want, and truly, THERE IS NO ONE TO STOP THEM. So... WHERE does it end....???
If a society (including its companies) does NOT respect the HUMAN RIGHTS of the basic element of its workforce- its WORKERS-- then I don't believe that is a sustainable society.
And from a purely financial perspective-- the endless debate of 'should we raise wages for workers?'' after SO MANY YEARS of stagnating, while everything else goes up-- is such an asinine one. I'm not a business major or an economist-- but can someone else explain to me, HOW it's supposed to be good for an economy-- when the majority of the workers are TOO POOR to buy anything...???
Seems like an obvious no-brainer.. but then again, nothing in today's world makes much sense to me anymore.
Of COURSE it's a huge problem in the U.S..... the media just doesn't want to talk about it..! Or if it's ever mentioned at all, it's always 'illegal immigrants being exploited'. Well that's that's certainly wrong,, but what about U.S. CITIZENS being exploited..?? And yes that also includes educated, intelligent skilled workers...!! This is the issue that NO ONE wants to discuss.
I can personally say that I am caught in this trap.. and SO MANY people like myself, especially in their 30's-50's.. have worked hard their whole lives and NEVER asked for a handout... and have gone from crappy job to an even crappier job.. and it never gets better. We have been taught our whole lives 'work hard and you'll succeed'-- HA!! what a joke and a LIE that turned out to be! You don't succeed, you're just exploited and used. Your only 'reward' is you just get to keep working harder, for less pay. We've all worked hard and tried to work smart and keep ending up in one hopeless situation after another where our human dignity is shot to hale and our wages just keep going down, down, down.. while the cost of everything else goes up, up, UP. Wake up, America-- WORKING PEOPLE ARE SINKING FAST.
The naysayers can't give us that same old 'stop whining, I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps and you can too.. blah blah blah.' The problem can't be denied anymore. I never wanted to believe it-- but it's so clear to me now. The system is truly RIGGED. And our own govt was more or less abandoned us-- the middle and working-class CITIZENS of this country.
'Free market capitalism' has proven to be unsustainable. The rich and welfare-dependent non-working poor always get lots of help.. but those caught in the middle are being squeezed into extinction. You can't tell a society that they are FREE to be as greedy as they wanna be, with nothing to stop them, and expect to have any semblance of stability or an equal chance for all.
Here's an example-- take franchises for instance. They have grown without much regulation and gotten through all the legal loopholes.. they have created a situation where they are immune from all the labor laws that generations ago, worked and fought hard for- to provide basic quality of life for working AMERICANS. And the current laws have not caught up with the reality-- in fact, they do nothing but PROTECT them and allow them to continue getting away with exploitation and abuse. So if our OWN GOVT. (that we pay taxes to- and they are supposed to work for US!)- does not regulate our enforce laws that are supposed to protect workers- and both parties, the franchise and the parent franchise company, each say they are legally free from responsibility-- then WHO WILL....??? Answer: NO ONE. Meanwhile, the workers cling to their jobs, afraid to speak up about abuse because, of course, they'll lose their job. And soon you have a situation that is not unlike slavery. or at best, indentured servitude. because the owners/bosses can get away with whatever they want, and truly, THERE IS NO ONE TO STOP THEM. So... WHERE does it end....???
If a society (including its companies) does NOT respect the HUMAN RIGHTS of the basic element of its workforce- its WORKERS-- then I don't believe that is a sustainable society.
And from a purely financial perspective-- the endless debate of 'should we raise wages for workers?'' after SO MANY YEARS of stagnating, while everything else goes up-- is such an asinine one. I'm not a business major or an economist-- but can someone else explain to me, HOW it's supposed to be good for an economy-- when the majority of the workers are TOO POOR to buy anything...???
Seems like an obvious no-brainer.. but then again, nothing in today's world makes much sense to me anymore.
There you said it. The people who get help are the super rich and the welfare poor. You in the middle are the tax payers. The government serves the rich. The rich needs the very poor. The government needs cheap votes from the poor. That's our structure today.
Though when people say the game is rigged, they mean solely rich people being too rich.
Every day must shed the light of christmas in which there is no blood shed nor violence
The good sheep know the voice of the Shepard and will heed it
The good sheep will enter the pasture but the Shepard will defend the sheep from the wolf and not allow him to enter
Merry Christmas
How does confiscatory levels of taxation against affluent people encourage them to produce?
I just don't see it.
If you max out the amount one person could earn, at say $10 Million, they will be inclined to sit on their keisters for the rest of their lives instead of continuing to produce at a high rate.
Why work for the privilege of just turning over your earnings to the tax collector? I suppose some people would, but relatively few.
The 30k is a representative amount to indicate that we would have a lower standard of living if we encouraged successful people to sit down after they earned a "reasonable" amount of money.
You are equating income with productivity. That is false. Higher income people are actually much less productive than moderate income people. The highest income people produce nothing at all.
You're proposing a lot of laws that people are not going to support. There are too interventionist.
Anyone who has half a brain would know that for a child to succeed in school and to be happy, you must have a two parent household and that's not enough both parents have to be wholeheartedly involved in nurturing a child.
Well at least 41% of new parents apparently don't even have half a brain, then. I am more for honest public discussion awareness about the dangers of single parenting, not necessarily legislating what people should do. Of course, subsidizing single parenthood with housing subsidies, food stamps, etc. doesn't help matters...but in today's "anything goes" environment anyone who proposes pulling back on those is a cruel, heartless, right wing nut job.
And as I said, I really don't think government policy is going to fix anything...I was basically just playing along with the thread topic. People need to wake up to how they're screwing themselves instead of blaming others and/or waiting for some magical savior to make everything better for them, but I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
Of COURSE it's a huge problem in the U.S..... the media just doesn't want to talk about it..!.
I don't know what media you're referring to. It seems to me the mainstream media talk about inequality all the time.
The problem with capitalism as it is practiced in the US is that we don't actually have free market capitalism...we have Crony Capitalism aka "Cartel-ism". The two are not the same. Why do folks like you not ever seem to understand that very important distinction?????
The problem is poverty. As an educator, a lot of money has been spent and much has been done to close the achievement gap in terms of changes in curriculum, new schools, and educational support programs. However, little real progress has been made and, in fact, in many cases the gap has and will continue to widen. Education is important but eliminating poverty does not come from education alone. Eliminating poverty starts with jobs that improve the human spirit.
To tackle poverty it begins with jobs. Dignity comes from work. Every effort must be made to create jobs that pay a livable wage and allow people to find dignity through their contributions and being able to provide for themselves and their families. Pope Francis says it best, “Not giving a job is not simply a question of not having the means to life: no. We can eat every day, we can go to Caritas, we can go to an association, a club, we can go there and they will give us something to eat. But this is not the problem. The problem is not being able to bring bread to the table at home: this is a serious problem, this takes away our dignity. And the most serious problem is not hunger, even though the problem exists. The most serious problem is that of dignity. For this reason we must work and defend the dignity that work gives us.”
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