Citizen complaint of the day: Don't let the rich erase history

Hey! Keep your hands off of my workplace ;)

It's very simple Stevil. Wages should go up in a straight, 45 degree or less line, not the curve they can be graphed at now. Nobody should work their ass off and only be earning subsistence money [or often even less than that]. And everyone, even the poor, deserve some nice [non-essential] things now and then. It makes people happy, so their existence is not just a soul crushing cycle.

I bumped this line of shelves and all this expensive stuff just dropped at my feet!

The problem is that we make it and we spend it. 50% of Americans have effectively no savings.

You say that you are a financial planner, but you clearly don't get the idea that they do this because they have NO DISPOSABLE INCOME.

Sad, really. Warped and sad.

How many people who are rich or are at least very comfortable are in that position because they:

1. Earned all of the money
2. Did not have any economic, educational, social or health care advantages that are part of the package of being wealthy?

For # 1 you have to subtract anyone who inherited wealth. These folks did not earn their income. They may be fortunate enough to understand how to maintain the wealth but to imply that they are wealthy because they somehow do a better job at keeping wealth ignores having wealth in the first place.

For # 2 they have never struggled at a subsistence level. If any of them grew up seeing their parents struggle at a subsistence level, and living without the social and educational advantages of wealthy parents I expect their overall economic profile will be very different.

As for the numbers if 50% effectively have no savings could that be due to not being able to earn enough to save money? The answer is yes. If you are living at a subsistence level then there will be no extra cash to save. So that 50% is a disingenuous statistic.

As for "reaching into my pocket and taking it" that is also disingenuous. It sidesteps the issue of income equality by referencing an old shibboleth of government or other entity engaging in economic robbery. On the other hand when an industry does not have sufficient competition, when an industry is effectively an oligopoly (such as telecommunications), when the executive class is able to manipulate boards of directors to paying them outrageous incomes, then that points toward a class of people who can metaphorically reach into pockets and take what they want.

Putting the blame on half or more of the poor in the country on merely their choices is a terrible whitewash. It ignores economic changes over the past 100 years. For example middle class incomes were high following WW2 in part because the United States was the only remaining significant industrial power. The United States enjoyed an industrial monopoly and many of its people benefitted from that. But that monopoly was lost with the result that wages inevitably would decrease for the many who no longer had access to industrial jobs. But did the executive wages decrease commensurate to overall wages decreasing? No. That right there is a example of the already wealthy abusing their privilege of power and wealth by continuing to increase many had to accept lower wages.

Walmart is another good example of rich versus forced poverty. It is a sin and social crime that a corporation can do the following:

1. Enter a community and suck the retail economic vitality out of the smaller businesses toward its centralizing lowest cost center. One could argue that the residents of the community choose to shop where the cost is lowest. But if they shopped in the smaller stores which can not buy in the massive quantities and therefore at the lowest manufacturers profit margins then the consumers would be guilty of not using the advantage of stores with the lowest prices.

2. Walmarts ability to demand the lowest profit margins from manufacturers (due to buying in massive quantities) means that the manufacturers have to A) keep their costs, including labor, down and B) to increase their wholesale costs to smaller retailers in order to make up for the lack of profit forced by Walmart. But one place where they do not decrease costs is by paying lower wages to executives.

3. A person could argue that manufacturers just should not bow down to Walmart by charging the lowest wholesale prices. But that would then result in ignoring a major retail channel and so loosing considerable sales. So then its either accept lower profit margins when selling to Walmart of accept lower overall profit by ignoring the Walmart channel.

4. Walmart then returns a negative to the communities where it has decimated the local store retail economy by paying wages so low that the employees still have to request government assistance to maintain an economic subsistence level of living. Is that then blaming the working poor for choosing to work for the wrong employer?

5. Yet the executives and inheritors of the Walmart fortune live very well, even to the point of amassing enough wealth open a large art museum.

As a person who grew up poor and so saw poverty first hand I see this differently. If not for resources such as Pell grants and student loans that supported me in earning a college degree I would not have managed to find work where a college degree is a prerequisite. Without a college degree and a native intelligence that allowed me to develop expertise in a well paying area, I would not have been in the right place at the right time to do well: what some might call luck. What I call having the preparation for enjoying the greater benefits. But that preparation is due to earning a degree and enjoying the native intelligence (and interest) to do well. Many do not enjoy that educational, personal and economic assisting constellation.

To argue that "half or more of the country is broke due to their own behavior" ignores the impersonal factors that allow the rich to be and stay rich, ignores the impersonal factors that lead to and maintain poverty and ignores that the road out of poverty is built of far more material than merely saving a few shekels.