We have probably read the same articles and studies.
The problem is most definitely the 1%, and the way they’re sucking money away from workers. When the middle class starts shrinking - and it is with not-so-surprising rapidly in many countries…
Perhaps the middle class has ben to lax about fighting for his own rights. Part of it is that globalization allow a companies to move factories to asia. With this possibility, gain a lot of bargaining power.
In theory the middle class have the power to vote and choose who drive the country. If the middle class is stupid and don’t know how to defend his own interest, here comes everyone else that eat his lunch.
And the middle class don’t work and is lazy for a few factors. First: is happy, it probably see no reason (yet) to be more politically conscience, second: is not well educated enough, his education is shitty. Education is maybe expensive, and can’t be mass produced. The middle class are consumers of mass-information and mass-education, and you get what you pay for in these things, because is expensive to produce some quality of it.
Perhaps the middle class can start working in the root of his problem, and ask for limits to globalization, and perhaps ask so corporations pay more taxes and support the cost of the government. I suppose the government is not happy to lose the middle-class platform, rich people can turn quickly in lousy tax payers, and a poor government can’t do well. This is not just a problem for middle class, is also a problem for the government, with government getting his financial system screwed.
The middle class is very sheepish. I have never seen this people reply to a new rule “No, actually,… THIS is how we want things to run”. I think the middle class has learned to just accept any shit put to then. He, is very hard to have any sympathy for that type of people!.
In theory the middle class have the power to vote and choose who drive the country.
Yea, but you don’t get to vote on whether Apple will build it’s phones in Silicon Valley instead of China, or that Walmart must buy shirts made in Tennessee instead of Vietnam.
…And that’s why companies should be held to the same ethical standards as people.
It’s not even good for the rich, as we’re seeing, for the middle class to fade away. We’re in serious danger of social regression. They’d rather hang onto a shell of prosperity rather than loosen their grip.
Well, at some point you need to take a hammer and start breaking fingers. I’d rather do it metaphorically, as in the Nordic countries, before it starts happening in reality some way down the line.
If you make the rules, you can make so the phones are built in Tennessee.
The classic tool to do that is having a import tariff, where products created in countries with lower wages have a higher tariff. This way you protect wages worldwide (not only on your own country). Maybe there are other tools. Like have another tax on products created outside on the country. So for the end customer, is cheaper to buy a USA product, than a china one.
The way globalization work nows, it run against the interest of wages, but If you control the rules, you can disable this bad effect.
Perhaps there will be some bad side effects. Maybe globalization is good for the world economy. But obviusly if is bad for you, and you don’t stop it, then well… you are wellcoming these bad effects.
The problem here is that you can’t make it cheaper to buy the US product. You can only make it more expensive to buy the other product.
So, the problems this type of isolationism causes are multifold:
You essentially start a trade war with the other nation, and they’ll do the same thing to all of your exports to them.
You raise the prices for products in your own nation, which means that your workers need higher wages to still have the same effective buying power. But they already had higher wages than other nations… so now you need to jack up the tarriffs, because you are trying to level the playing field even more.
The reality is this… If some guy is willing to do exactly what you do, for less money… then he deserves the job. You need to adjust to the situation. Other plans are likely to fail.
That doesn’t really make it cheaper, it just changes how you’re paying for it. If you subsidize the price of widgets, but then raise taxes to pay for the half of the widget no one is paying for, the price of the widget hasn’t changed. You’ve just socialized the cost of the widget. When this is something like health insurance I don’t have much trouble with it, since it’s something everyone should have as a social good anyway. When it’s, say, cars, it’s not as good an idea for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps a minor point, but subsidies don’t necessarily make goods cheaper for consumers. They make it effectively cheaper for the producer to make. Whether those savings are passed on in the final price of the product is not a given.
The war already exist, and are a war against the middle class.
The current situation is that if you are a corporation, you can create products where wages are low (say asia), and sell the products where wages are high. If you are a middle class person, you can’t buy products in asia with you westerned wage.
You raise the prices for products in your own nation, which means that your workers need higher wages to still have the same effective buying power. But they already had higher wages than other nations… so now you need to jack up the tarriffs, because you are trying to level the playing field even more.
This is true. Will result on more money on the pockets, but less stuff you can actually buy. Is this good or bad? do we need a lot of electronic toys? what good do us having a lot of electronic toys and being unemployed?
The reality is this… If some guy is willing to do exactly what you do, for less money… then he deserves the job.
My company sells some software for 3000. Other company tried to enter our market with a competing product that cost 200.
That company has closed, because there’s a very small number of companies that can buy the product, so being so cheap is a losing strategy.
Perhaps some of our customers want our product for 40. But thats not the cost of it, so we don’t sell it at that price.
These suckers that tried that do my work for less money are now unemployed.
I don’t always buy the cheaper product. And I don’t always pay the lower wages. The lower price product could be some product with problems… It sometimes is not, but you need to know more to make a informed decision. Paying a very low salary for a person is mostly ok, but what you can end doing is exploiting that person. So I think you would raise the wage of that person to some decent level, even if that person don’t ask for it. Thats better for you, because that person will continue working for you, and will not quit to search a better opportunity. Is expensive to train new people.
So about “a person that work for less money…” thats the wrong way to write it. A person deserve a decent wage. A person working with a wage that is not decent, deserve for that wage to be raised.
More than 80 percent of the residential mortgage loans that have gone into foreclosure in San Francisco contain one or more clear violations of the law, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting said Wednesday.
While the errors, many of them technical paperwork violations, don’t necessarily indicate criminal conduct by lenders and others in the mortgage industry, they do show that changes must be made in California’s century-old real estate regulations, he added.
Latest Family Guy had a great line from Peter when he joined the Tea Party. Something like, “But what kind of organization wants a fat angry white guy who hates listening?”
