Category: Income gap

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Warning to the Democrats and the undecided

I did not pen these words, but they are so true:

Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them- we will do more of them we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.

The most astonishing fact to  me is that this is from a Democratic Convention speech that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered in 1936. And it still rings true today.

My warning is, beware of the republicans offerings when it comes to budget work. They don’t want to save Medicare. They want it to fail fast. They don’t want to spread financial opportunities across the population. They want to institute a class system akin to the old British system, with Lords and Dukes and other nobility. Not in title, but in practice. Bu having an elite of people who owns close to everything, means that the rest of the people will become vassals with no chance to move into the owning class.

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What does $50,000.00 give you?

It either gives you a median income for a family in the United States of America. Or it gives you a seat at a Romney fundraiser.

I’m not surprised at Mitt Romney’s comment at the now famous private fundraiser. What I’m surprised about is that very little has been made of the fact that each of the clients at the fundraiser paid $50,000.00. Roughly the same amount that half of US families earn less than. The median family income in 2011 was just above $51,000.00. Are you surprised that these very rich people cannot fathom what matters to the large majority of wage slaves. Or wish-they-could-be wage slaves as the case may be.

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What are you worth, and how does it compare?

What we are getting paid for what we do displays in a very crude way what we are worth to society. Crude in the sense that it’s a very one dimensional measurement, but still relevant, since most of our society consists of corporations and their task, in turn, is to maximize the value for their owners.

Of course that means that what you get paid is the lower than the value you contribue, or at least it should be. That is how corporations make money. By paying you less than the value you contribute. If you include all secondary costs that you incur, then the difference between your contribution and your cost is what you bring in as profit for the company. The larger that difference, the more valuable you should be to the company, regardless of how much you are paid.

Of course, the public sector doesn’t try to make profit. They try to provide services for the public in an as efficient manner as possible. As salaried in the private sector go up, keeping good people working in the public sector is getting increasingly difficult. The people have to have other drivers than only salary. Sense of service or status might be some.

However, I sometimes wonder about the priorities that society shows by pay disparities. Is Judge Judy doing a job that is worth 100 time what Justice Scalia does? A US Supreme Court Justice is paid around $200,000 per year. Judge Judy gets around $20,000,000. Along the same lines, are the efforts of Rush Limbaugh worth more than 100 times than the efforts of the President of the USA? The president gets approximately $400,000 per year. Mr. Limbaugh earns about $50,000,000 per year.

I could bring up a lot of other misalignments in reward versus value, even if you look solely at the private sector. But I think it’s worth to keep in mind that the average family income in the USA is in the region of $50,000. That is for a family, not for a person. That means that the effort of 1,000 families is valued at the same level as Mr. Limbaugh.

I believe that if nothing is done about the income disparity, the country of USA will slide into a more and more dire financial situation. Let me know what you think.