I can’t help but wondering what good it does to “buy American” (per Roger Simmermaker’s article) when the cheap items sold in the U.S. are still made in factories that don’t pay living wages or largely employee illegal aliens who send most of their paychecks out of the country. What you need is a list of “ethical” American manufacturers, not just a list of Robber Barons who still happen to have a few factories here.
The entire cause of the financial mess America is now in can be summed up in two words: living wages. There are not enough living-wage jobs in this country for each household to have at least one person in one – it’s that simple. There are three basic reasons for this.
First, feminism – which by the way destroyed the old “household” unpaid economy and forced all the formerly unpaid services into the paid economy, but only at wages far lower than the services are truly worth. If it weren’t for all the illegal alien nannies and the families who don’t pay the required taxes and fees for having nannies, it would be painfully obvious to everyone that it is not truly economical for the vast majority of married woman with young children to work outside the home. As it is, even women who use day care and elder care centers for their care needs are usually not truly bringing in enough money to make it worthwhile for the family after these expenses plus the additional costs of outside employment are factored in. There was a book on that subject a few years ago called “The Two Income Trap,” I believe.
Second, corporate greed, pure and simple – no CEO or board member anywhere is worth 600 times what their ordinary front-line employees are paid, period. That money could have raised the front-line employees’ wages to living wage levels for their community many times over. A person who isn’t making living wages can’t afford to pay other people to do their chores (i.e., hire “service economy” firms for their household needs).
Nor will making more loans “available” for America’s underpaid workers help anyone, since people’s budgets are simply maxed out. No amount of offering more loans to people will help move cars or any other merchandise in this country, because people are already paying all they can afford in loans and interest due to the lack of living wages. Until they get out of debt, which will be years and years from now for most people, they simply can’t afford to shop when the income they have barely covers their already existing bills.
And the third cause of wage stagnation is, as everybody already knows, the globalization scam in which the Robber Barons make American employees compete with middle schoolers working 15 hours a day with no Sabbaths, holidays, health care, labor laws or environmental regulations, all for 50 cents an hour. By breaking the social contract with American workers and externalizing social costs of doing business off onto the taxpayers (who now, of course, no longer make living wages), this economy had nowhere to go but into a ditch. Wages now, adjusted for inflation, are at 1970s levels – but we have 2009 expenses. More and more people have fewer or no benefits. Something had to give.
Plenty of us saw this coming. Even the “mortgage meltdown” can be traced to the lack of living wages. Starting in the ’80s, if you recall, there was a big push to raise the rates of home ownership because they were falling (due to de facto wage stagnation). The reason non-homeowners didn’t already own homes in the first place was because they could not meet the down payment requirements and income ration vis-à-vis the price of the houses available. The government began “encouraging” more lenient loans, and ownership rates rose somewhat. But by the 1990s, if you recall, social policies such as the “broken window” theory were put forward indicating that good neighborhoods where home ownership was the norm actually reduced many social ills – so another push was made. Again, people didn’t have big down payments or adequate income, so again mortgage loan standards had to be lowered to meet these social policy goals.
At that point we’re up to the late 1990s and early 2000s, but people still had basically 1970s income (adjusted for inflation). This is where loan standards basically started disappearing altogether, because banks had already loaned mortgage money to everyone who was more-or-less qualified to have one, but in order to keep their incoming rolling in, banks still needed to make mortgages. So all heck broke lose, and the result we see today. None of this would have happened if not for the wage stagnation due to too many workers chasing too few living-wage jobs. Standards would never have had to be lowered to get people into homes in the first place.
This is, of course, just a letter and not a dissertation, so the issues are somewhat simplified here. But the main point is clear: America bought into the false globalist teaching that self-sufficiency is bad, and now our workers are losing their homes and cars and retirement because of it. Our essential industries and even our national security are now hostage to foreigners who hate us, and it is going to be a very, very painful transition back to a sustainable economy.
Ahavah Gayle
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