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Please realize that millions were able to buy homes and further education as a result of military service...
The same still holds true today but you are right... it is available to far fewer since many no longer serve.
The entire post war boom was fueled by returning GI's and the benefits they earned.
We recently hired a new minted Registered Nurse... she came from a very depressed region where Walmart is the best many could aspire... she joined the Navy at age 18 and gained a career in medical... she used her benefits to earn her RN degree and buy a home... imagine that in 2013?
Buying a home is something that should be achievable for a large portion of the population, with or without outside aid based on military service.
Often in prestigious coastal metros, prices are so high the median wage earner, or even couple, cannot afford a median priced home within a reasonable commuting distance of the job centers. In rural areas and small towns, wages are often so low that everything goes to subsistence, and it's hard to save up on those low wages for a downpayment to buy anything.
There is still somewhat of a sweet spot in mid-major metros in flyover country, but even many of these are getting prohibitively expensive. See Nashville, Austin, and Denver.
... A society riddled with income inequality and lack of opportunity is not a moral or healthy society. A society that allows its elderly to live in poverty and the masses at the mercy of relentless marketing and predatory business practices by every industry there is, is not a moral society either. It will not remain a healthy society either. The U.S. is an example.
Americans carry on about "entitlement" constantly. What used to be called protections and safety-nets, the Republicans in the 1980s got us to start calling entitlements, which has a negative connotation. We accuse our fellow Americans of feeling entitled and no longer feel the moral imperative to provide adequate safety-nets for everyone, as well as the need to protect the greater good for our own sake and those of following generations. What we do have left, we increasingly open up to the private sector to exploit for profit, which adds to the national cost as it also decreases the safety-nets.
We say we can't afford those safety-nets anymore, buying into the rhetoric that they are doomed, there are no answers, so privatization of everything is better (even though history does not support that conclusion), but the main reason we can't afford what we once did is because in only 35 years, there has been a massive shift of wealth from the majority to a small minority, to the point that our once thriving middle-class is effectively gone. Further, we've been convinced that because a person has more, he or she deserves more than everyone else. Michael Jordan, Kanye West, the Kardashians, and my wealthy relative deserve more in old age than do the Mother Theresa-types and all the rest of us, regardless of how responsible, caring, and productive we've been as citizens raising another generation of citizens.
While we are pointing fingers at each other, making "sense of entitlement" accusations, we miss that no one feels more entitled than does the wealthy class.
Please realize that millions were able to buy homes and further education as a result of military service...
The same still holds true today but you are right... it is available to far fewer since many no longer serve.
The entire post war boom was fueled by returning GI's and the benefits they earned.
We recently hired a new minted Registered Nurse... she came from a very depressed region where Walmart is the best many could aspire... she joined the Navy at age 18 and gained a career in medical... she used her benefits to earn her RN degree and buy a home... imagine that in 2013?
Good for her
I collected apartment buildings, we all need a hobby
I understand your point. My point is that your point is meaningless regarding who has greater needs and who is most rewarded and better cared for, regardless of why or how they end up that way. SSI tax is not a progressive tax, but it should be, and without loopholes for the rich.
If I invest $5.00 and you invest $500,000.00, it won't matter what the return on my investment is. I'll still be in poverty. You'll make enough to make even more profits from your profit.
If you are in poverty, that is not the fault of SS.
I'm sorry, but that just isn't true for millions of Americans. What is true for millions of Americans is they are working in a culture where the companies employing them don't feel any responsibility to them. All of us, customers and employees alike, are nothing more than money machines hunted for every last penny of profit they can squeeze out of us. Predators run this country.
Two examples in my own family:
An older relative is one of the best in his specialized field and he's well known in his field because he's good at it and he's been in it for 35 years. He's not retirement age yet, but for the last 15 years, as the economy started tanking and corporate cultural changes escalated, he's suffered increasing job insecurity, his salary has plummeted in just the last three years, almost all of his benefits but medical are gone, and medical isn't close to what it used to be. Why? Because the companies who hire in his field do not care if he is one of the best and most experienced and so will bring more to their clients. They want to pay less and offer fewer benefits, and they can if they hire more inexperienced people. (if they all do it, the customers can't complain because there is nothing to compare to). If they hire younger people, their healthcare costs will be lower too.
So now he suffers constant chronic stress over whether he is going to be employed another year, and to stay employed his salary has gone down by a lot. He's had no choice because the salary and benefits corporate culture used to understand he'd earned and deserved for what he brought to the table, now expects him to compete with much younger, less experienced people, which means accept their compensation levels or be unemployed. BTW, the steadily declining salaries in just the last three years means less for retirement savings, too.
The latest ploy is to try to get him to agree to be hired as a "consultant" instead of an employee, which would make him a self-employed independent contractor, then they would only have to pay him an hourly wage with no benefits and no 401k. They would still receive the same payments from the clients, but they would be able to keep a larger chunk of it.
My friends in the healthcare field of have already gone through this, especially the nurses. Many nurses have to work per-diem now, with none of the benefits that should go with working full-time because on paper they are independent contractors. Other industries, too, have been forcing this scenario on their employees. It's been going on in the IT industry for about 20 years.
A younger relative is a cook in fine dining restaurants. He started out as a dishwasher when he was in his early 20s and because he worked hard and was dependable, he quickly worked his way up. However, he's 30-years-old now and earned no more than $11.00 an hour. His employers change every time a restaurant he works in is sold to a bigger company. Once a sale happens, the new companies (Texas companies are the worst, by the way) immediately raise the exploitation levels. The industry already requires their kitchen staffs to work double shifts, to live for their employers with little regard for their personal lives, and to be willing to work 12 hours without a break regardless of the law, but then new ownership starts canning anyone who looks at them wrong, they take away the few perks or benefits there were, and they do not give raises. They promise raises, but they don't actually give them.
Employees are nothing but numbers on spreadsheets back at corporate headquarters. Sometimes new ownership completely ruins a thriving restaurant and it goes under. Then they''re all out of a job (and employees find out when they show up for work and find the place closed). Other times new ownership just screws it up enough to hurt business and then, because they refuse to suffer any losses, take it out of the hides of their employees.
So, after the years he's worked, gained proficiency, been promoted, and not been fired or laid-off even when new ownership was cleaning house (because he was valuable to them), he still has never earned over $11.00 an hour, and he receives no benefits at all. None. And it isn't as if he' stayed in only one place no matter how crummy he's treated. He's changed jobs when he realized a current job was going nowhere, but it's never made a difference because the same things happened in all of them. He takes a job, they make promises, they don't keep them or the restaurant is sold and the new owners make promises but don't keep them.
How is a man supposed to ever have a wife and children if he can't earn enough money no matter how hard he works or how much value be brings to the employer?
Ours is a big, extended family with a variety of education and income levels as well as a wide variety of professions among us (including the college graduates working for free as "unpaid interns," which is the current corporate scam to get free labor in a bad economy that leaves young people few choices), so I could provide more, but in the two examples I just gave, there is no way for either of those men to "provide more value to your employer or your customer." The employers just want to cut costs to increase profits, and their employees are expendable.
Amen to all of the above! And the corporate resistance to increasing wages and benefits is not because it would put them out of business, but because they would not make quite as huge of a profit as they feel entitled to. All on the backs of the workers who are the ones who keep things running. But regardless, people still keep voting for the same politicians that are in the pockets of big business and work to maintain the status quo. The US is circling the drain and it shows.
Your friend is disgusting to the max. And what is equally disgusting is that we taxpayers will be subsidizing her existence from now until she dies. And some people want the "rich" to pay more taxes to help people like your friend.
Exactly how is the taxpayer going to subsidize this individual? Indications are that she worked most of her life, and paid SS taxes. She won't be "subsidized" any more or less than any other senior citizen.
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Who really feels entitled?
