The current 800-lb gorilla (there've been many over my lifetime) - in the room, while everyone tries to sip their drink and ignore it - is a simple economic truth: ya cannot continually cut spending unless ya increase revenue. If you lose your job, you'll give up a lot of things to cut your outlay, but if you have a functioning brain cell, you'll also do your damndest to increase your income by looking for work.
The zealot chuckle-heads who have highjacked the admittedly never-very-wonderful-since-Abe-Lincoln bit it Republican Party refuse to entertain this economic truth. Like all zealots, their vision is down the surprisingly narrow (for such huge...uh...never mind) tunnel of their own....uh...never mind, keep it a family-friendly blog, eh?
Oh, and the 800-lb gorilla has a girlfriend; her name is Eliminate The Cap On Earnings Subject To Social Security Taxes. Bah-dah-boom-bah-dah-bing - Social Security becomes and remains viable.
Hey, I'm forgetting the 800-lb gorilla's extremely incorrigible teenage kid - American jobs shipped to countries who'll do it for dimes. Who benefits from this? Not the American worker, fer shure. Not the exploited foreign worker, fer dang shure. The beneficiaries would be the shareholders, CEOs, COOs, CFOs and assorted other Os of corporations doing the job-shipping. They make big bucks and all we get are lousy, cheap T-shirts. And all our politicians get are giant campaign donations and a lot of whining in their (mostly) shell-pink ears every time anyone raises the idea of penalizing companies who export perfectly doable jobs with a butt-biting surtax on their profits. Me, I'd rather pay the extra five or seven bucks for a T-shirt, a pair of American-made shoes, knowing some of the money went to a fellow citizen, who'd spend it right here.
Yeah, it's great to help people in other countries, but at the expense of American workers, at the expense of American know-how - I mean, do you even know anyone who can repair shoes? Are any of the shoes we get even repairable? People - we don't make anything for ourselves anymore except rhetoric (hot air - hmm, could this contribute to global warming) and foreign entanglements (George Washington advised steering clear of these, but hey what did he know)?
The 800-lb gorilla, his girlfriend and his rotten teenage kid will never go away unless regular, middle-of-the-road, non-zealot Americans wake up, shut off the TV, the video game, the i-whatzit-of-the-week, and let both the poxy houses of the federal government know what we demand to be done.
Said my piece for a Monday. Now go ye forth and do likewise, y'all.
Oh, I wish they would listen to you.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wish the government would do what we are required to do - live within our means or pay the consequences one way or the other.
The Social Security is a huge debacle. Ugh. Did you know that they reduced the amount this year that we are taking from employees for social security? My husband owns a small business and I could tell you a tale about how they went about NOT informing us of this change. But WHY? And how? How can they consider reducing anything right now when it's in a shambles? Boggles my mind.