A call for change. Again. A call for fairness and equality and this Op/Ed will bring tears to your eyes, with it’s emotional plea and crafty wordmanship.
Or it will bring out the anger and frustration so many people feel. For good reason.
THE CRISIS roiling Wall Street has led to calls for a new type of capitalism, presenting a real opportunity for positive and productive changes. What would market capitalism 2.0 look like? To start, it would pay more attention to fairness. It would also guarantee that full-time workers don’t live in poverty. Finally, it would offer an enhanced safety net.
Fairness??
Show me how Madam.
The top 1 percent of earners in the United States gained $600 billion annually in income while the bottom 80 percent lost that same $600 billion from 1979 to 2008. That translates into an average gain of $500,000 in annual income for each person at the top, while those at the bottom lost an average of $8,000.
Those pesky top feeders…and bottom feeders too.
It is not a surprise that the ranks of the working poor are swelling. At the same time that real wages have been decreasing for a significant proportion of American workers, costs have been rising, leaving many families without enough money to cover their basic human needs such as food, fuel, healthcare, and housing. Today, one in four working families in the United States is considered low-income.
But rest assured, they have their cell phones, Internet access and XBoxes. Do we label these things as basic human needs as well? I can’t count how many “poor” people I know, who have all this and more: Rent paid for the government; day care paid for by the government; food subsidized, as well as free or very cheap health care insurance provided under the Medicare/Medicaid brand…again, paid by the government. Does all this government forced fairness help people or hurt them?
I work my ass off to have the things I have. I also work my ass off so the poor fat bitch at the apartment complex can sit around all fucking day long, yacking and texting, cooking crappy food she bought with Food Stamps, while her kids are sitting at some day camp site somewhere. She manages quite well for herself.
So long as I bust ass working, she is self reliant. She is independent. And add some salt to the mix: She’s could be an illegal immigrant.
Now how’s that for fairness?? Screw me the American worker. But reward her.
A new social contract is needed, guaranteeing that anyone who works full time will not be poor. We need to “make work pay.” A couple of ways to do this quickly include expanding the earned income tax credit, which provides a tax refund to low-income wage earners, and assisting working families to access affordable child care. These policies would represent an investment in the workforce and in productivity.
WORK DOES PAY. Earned income taxes are WRONG. It makes NO sense to give “poor” people a tax refund on income they never earned. As for child care, keep it in the family. Or neighborhood. Why should the government PAY for it?
A critical first step is to modernize the Unemployment Insurance program, because only about one out of every three who are unemployed receive any help when they lose a job.
Ahh…here we go. So they want to make “work pay” at the same time they want to make NOT WORKING PAY. The two don’t together. Very few people will seriously look for a job when they are being compensated for being unemployed. I view this as the most wasteful form of “insurance” the world has ever seen. Remove it, and you can bet your sore ass people WILL be employed. Remove all the assistance welfare benefits incentives and I can guarantee people WILL get out and find a job and earn a living. Will it be easy? Nope. Will it be fair? Nope. But it will be what capitalism is about. We have TOO many people NOT working by choice, choosing instead to feed off the big teat of MAMA Government. Perhaps this is a reason capitalism isn’t working??
Poverty isn’t what it once was. We now have people making choices: Keeping the Internet access active vs. buying food. Paying for cell phone service vs. health insurance premiums. Not working BUT getting paid anyway. ALL at the courtesy of our government. Which means, basically, YOU and ME. Working people are paying the tabs on ALL of this.
Capitalism 1.0 can work, if government stepped out of the picture. Now the liberal whiney asses want to create a newer, more modern and fair version, at even greater cost. Think the markets and economy are bad now? Wait another 20 or 30 yrs from the date Ms. Silbert’s vision comes to life.